


Symbiotic

by Lissadiane



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-25
Updated: 2018-11-25
Packaged: 2019-08-28 18:28:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 44,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16728618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lissadiane/pseuds/Lissadiane
Summary: Clint is a 15-year-old circus brat and pickpocket still growing into his shoulders the first time he meets Bucky, a meeting which leaves a mark on him, literally -- fingerprint bruises on his wrists that won't heal and an echo of someone else's emotions in his chest. That bond becomes the only good thing he's got, bringing him back from Loki's ice cold magic and all the shit that comes after. It takes a long time for him to realize that sometimes, it's the only thing bringing Bucky back too.A soulmate AU.





	Symbiotic

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Villainny (Nny)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nny/gifts).



> Written for [Nny](https://winterhawkkisses.tumblr.com/), who writes so much for me and everyone else at [Winterhawk kisses](https://winterhawkkisses.tumblr.com/), so I asked her what she'd want someone to write for her, and this is vaguely what she asked for. It's basically a mash up of Marvel movie universe, a but of comic Hawkeye, mixed up and shaken and still vaguely recognizable.
> 
> It also could not have been written without the cheerleading of the amazing [skoosie](https://pantstomatch.tumblr.com), who continues to support everything I write, even when it isn't Stiles and Derek. I'm still working on getting her to write me a Winterhawk story, and my birthday is coming up, so.

Symbiotic

Clint is fifteen years old and he’s only just started to grow into his shoulders. He’s scruffy in a way that helps make him invisible, hair falling over his eyes just this side of unkempt, clothing a size or two too big so it falls over his hands and obscures the exact dimensions of his body, to help hide just a little bit better.

Picking pockets is easier when you’re invisible, and looking like just another poor kid lurking outside the circus is just about as invisible as he can get.

It certainly helps keep his marks from recognizing him as the brightly sharp and shining Amazing Hawkeye they watched under the big top. The only thing he’s got in common with that guy is the same sense of grace and nimble fingers that make hitting a target just as easy as picking a pocket.

He and Barney have a system. Clint picks a pocket and disappears into the crowd and passes it to his brother who makes it disappear. Later, they’ll split the proceeds (minus whatever percentage they owe the circus, of course). Clint tries to pick marks who might have a lot in their wallets – older ladies with too many grandchildren to keep track of, men trying to impress ladies in fur coats. He stays away from anyone too young, too fast, too poor –

That’s why it makes no sense at all that he’s been shadowing a particularly poor looking pair who probably haven’t got a dollar to split between them. He can’t help it, though – he’s barely fifteen years old and he’s just caught a glimpse of the most beautiful boy he’s ever seen and he forgets all about looking for a good return on investment, a mark fat enough to make the reward worth the risk.

Somehow, the reward of inching just close enough to that boy to see the exact colour of his eyes, to hear his laughter as he teases the guy he’s with – somehow that reward seems worth all the risks.

The guy is a few years older, and clean cut in a way that Clint wishes he could pull off. His hair is slicked back, he’s fully grown into his shoulders, the line of his jaw, his smirky grin. He’s got an arm slung around a smaller, scruffier blonde guy who seems upset about something, his cheeks flushed and his voice raised, but Clint, for the life of him, can’t listen to a word the smaller guy is saying. He’s too busy staring, drifting closer, stars in his eyes and tumbling somewhere in his chest.

It’s dark here, shadows cut through with stage and traffic lights, mixing in a confusing mess of blinding shadow and brightness. The air is thick with burned popcorn and cotton candy, undercut with moldy hay and animal shit from the trailers out back. Clint should have his pockets full of wallets and jewelry by now and Barney’s probably getting impatient, but fuck.

Clint just needs to get a little closer and he doesn’t know why but he reaches forward when he’s near enough and it’s not to take, it’s just to touch.

Before he can, he stumbles – the Amazing Hawkeye, fucking full of grace, trips over his own damned feet and tumbles forward.

And it’s the guy who touches him, spinning with reflexes that are too quick, like he knows exactly where Clint is going to be before Clint is even there.

His hand grabs Clint by the wrist and everything – the noise, the music, the milling crowds, the frenetic energy of the clowns and jugglers and pickpockets slipping in between – all of it freezes and that that exists is Clint’s wrist and the hand wrapped around it and the echoing silence between each breath Clint draws.

It’s like the whole world holds its breath and Clint doesn’t understand, so he looks up from the hand wrapped around his wrist and into the gray eyes of the guy holding onto him and suddenly Clint just knows. He knows that he’s been wandering around waiting for this specific second, he knows that somehow this guy has shoved his way into the empty places in and around Clint’s heart with a clumsy disregard for boundaries or propriety or anything else. He knows that he’s not alone anymore and that he had always been alone before, even though he hadn’t known it.

Clint knows that he’s complete in a way he hadn’t been before.

What he doesn’t know is why or how or what it means or what the guy’s fucking name is.

“Hey,” the guy says, slow and unsteady, eyes darkening and mouth tipping a little, confused. “I know you.”

“Yeah,” Clint says, breathless, because somehow, he knows this guy too. Not his name – but all the things that count.

Except then the guy says, “You’re the archer. Right?”

And then Barney is hustling him away, making it look like an accident, and hissing a string of curse words under his breath, and the guy’s little friend is saying, “Bucky? You okay?”

So Clint steals his wallet as he’s pulled away because what the fuck else is he supposed to do and then he’s pulled off into the crowd and disappears the way Barney always taught him.

Only this time, he feels like he takes his mark with him – like Bucky’s burrowed deep inside and Clint might never be able to disappear again.

He isn’t sure he likes it, but what can he do?

He slips the wallet into his own pocket and keeps it even after he hands over the rest of his take to Barney, and spends the rest of the night in his trailer, tracing his thumb nail along the edge of James Buchanan Barnes’ driver’s license, studying his picture, and wondering what the fuck just happened.

He feels different – he’s always felt an itch beneath his skin that made him want to get up and run, but now… now it feels like maybe he’s got somewhere to run to. And when he dreams, sometimes he dreams of a dingy apartment with paper thin walls and a sister he’s never had and a high school – a real fucking high school – with football teams and cheerleaders and parties and a small, sickly blonde dude who needs a little help growing into his own damned shoulders.

It doesn’t change anything, though. Clint still colours his face with grease paint and glitter, still grins smugly in the circus ring before completing his act, still picks the pockets of those who cheer him on from the stand, and still moves across the country, letting that itching, urgent sense of home fall farther and farther behind.

But he keeps the driver’s license. And sometimes when it’s late and he’s lonely and Barney is gone or drunk or in one of his moods, he whispers Bucky’s full name to himself like a mantra and thinks that maybe, maybe, something will change.

Because something has to, because he can’t keep going on like this.

*

Clint’s got bruises on his wrist and no explanation for them and he has no recollection of where they came from, because he’s always got bruises somewhere. These ones, though, never seem to fade, and look like a little like fingerprints.

Sometimes he wraps the fingers of his other hand around his wrist, matching his fingers up to the mark, and it feels like the chaos of the circus and of Barney and of whatever else is going on and going wrong in his life fades away. The world goes softer and careful and calm and he’s by himself but he’s not alone and most of all, he’s not lonely.

But for the most part, the world stays the same. Same shit show, same circus, different day.

His dreams of high school and an ordinary life living in poverty but still happy and whole and part of something sweet and simple – those dreams fade away and are replaced with other dreams – military and marching and gun drills and sergeants barking orders

Clint doesn’t like it, filled with an anxiety he can’t express. He wakes up with the echo of gunfire in his ears and his breath strangled in his chest, catching on a name he wants to scream but can’t recall.

So he traces the beat up driver’s license with Bucky’s picture on it and wonders why his mind has latched onto that sort of nightmare to torture him with when his own life has so much nightmare material to work with.

But exhaustion makes him clumsy and stupid and he can still hit a fucking target, of course he can – blindfolded or upside down or backwards or swinging through a flaming hoop, whatever the fuck they dream up, he can hit it. It’s just, exhaustion makes the rest of the act hard to pull off – the shining bright and smug part of the act he needs, the swagger he needs, to make it a circus act instead of just a guy hitting a target while the world burns around him.

Barney gets pissed – everyone gets pissed off – but Clint is fine and he’s dealing with it and he’s getting applause and he’s bringing in money, and whatever he’s bringing in, he’s supplementing with whatever he steals, and it’s fucking fine.

He’s eighteen years old and he’s so fucking angry and when his mind isn’t filled with grease paint and cotton candy and screaming crowds and animal shit and engine oil, it’s echoing with artillery fire and he’s fucking tired and he’s fucking scared and he’s _eighteen years old_ and he’s had just about enough of this life.

He’s tired.

And then, in the middle of one feverish night, where heat rolls over the Midwestern plain and his body is sticky and aching but his insides are ice cold, he wakes up as the sky cracks open with thunder and he’s screaming, shrieking, twisting on his narrow cot and tearing at his arm and begging – begging for help, for an end to the pain, for someone, anyone, to fix it.

He’s sobbing and when Barney flicks on the light, Clint swears to god his arm will be torn apart, he’ll be bathed in his own blood, he’ll be broken and bleeding –

But there is just sweat and his own breath burning in his throat, his face wet with tears, and Barney snarling, “Who the hell is Steve?”

Clint doesn’t answer. He’s too busy staring at his arm and trying to understand how it’s still there when he could swear to god it was trapped – he was trapped.

That panicky feeling is still rattling around, but it was just a dream. A dusty desert, the sharp scent of gunfire, of motor oil, of sweat and anxiety, an explosion and the rattle of artillery, the world tipping and rolling sideways, twisting through the air. All blood and screaming and begging but no one comes and he’s lying there in pieces.

But it was just a dream.

Except he can still taste his own blood.

“Clint? Hey. What the fuck,” Barney says, shaking him.

Clint stares at him and his arm feels mangled, twisted, filled with pins and needles, but it looks fine – still marred by the fingerprint bruises on his wrist, but fine.

“I don’t know,” he says. Rain starts to rattle on the tin roof of their trailer as the storm breaks above. “I don’t know anyone named Steve,” he says.

“Man the fuck up,” Barney snaps. “They hear you carrying on like this, you’re out.”

“Yeah,” Clint agrees, feverish and barely listening.

Barney snorts, disgusted, and storms from the trailer, and Clint curls up on his side, around his left arm, and lets himself cry, pressing his face to his pillow.

“Please,” he mumbles, but he doesn’t know what he’s asking for. “Please, please, please.”

The dreams of gunfire stop for a long while after that.

*

Clint is colder after that, and sometimes, his arm doesn’t work the way he wants it to. He’s got pins and needles, his muscles twitch, his fingers go numb, and sometimes he’s got phantom pains he can’t explain. His shoulder aches, his back aches, something deep in his chest aches.

Sometimes he misses the fucking bullseye.

In the end, it’s Barney who tells him that the circus has no place for an archer who only hits nine out of ten targets.

They leave him in New Jersey with a handful of crumpled singles and fives, a backpack of clothes and his bow, which is more than they had to leave him, to be fair.

He hasn’t got a high school education, he hasn’t got any family to call for help, he hasn’t got anywhere to go. He sleeps on the streets for a while, making his way to New York, panhandling and showing off his skill with his bow. Tourists don’t care that he’s an inch or two off every dozen shots or so. He makes enough to keep himself in coffee and cheese burgers and he doesn’t even have to fall back onto pickpocketing to do it.

There’s a creeping sense of dread, though, an inability to see where his future is going. This isn’t a sustainable life – but then, the circus hadn’t been sustainable either.

When he sleeps, he doesn’t dream.

Winter starts closing in, bringing with it a sharp chill that Clint isn’t used to. Usually by now, the circus would be on its way south for the winter. He’s not sure what to do but knows living on the streets in a New York winter isn’t something he’s really cut out for. He considers hitching a ride south.

He sets up his target in Central Park, hoping to make enough for a train ticket south, thinking maybe he’ll pool his money together and see how far it’ll take him. He can’t feel his fingers again, the cold having sunk deep into his bones, and his arm is aching, tingling in that uncomfortable way it has since that nightmare –

He shakes off memories of bullets, metal tearing, flesh tearing, closes his eyes and breathes.

He lets go of the bow string and lands an impressive trick shot and the little crowd that’s gathered cheers and tosses a few crumpled bills into his hat.

Clint shoots until it gets dark and then packs up, stuffing his pockets with bills, and then makes his way back towards the bridge where he’s been spending his nights. He’s hungry and his shoulders are aching from shooting, from sleeping under the bridge.

He tucks himself into the little shadowy corner he found, hiding his bow away carefully, and pressing his fingers to the bruises on his wrist out of habit. Nothing happens – no sweet hush, no sense of not being alone, no echo of laughter and teasing and brightness that he hadn’t even realized he needed until it was gone.

He’s 18 years old and he’s living under a bridge in New York City and he’s always felt alone, but now, for the first time, he really feels it, rattling around in his bones.

He’s afraid and he doesn’t know what to do about it.

He falls asleep, hoping against hope that maybe he’ll dream again – even a dream of bloodshed and artillery rounds, he’ll take it. He’ll take all of it. Anything.

But instead, he gets nothing, again.

Until a sharp, animalistic cry wakes him.

Clint tumbles out of his little shelter and scrambles for his bow, trying to shake off the aching chill, the disorientation. He can still hear that yelping, sharp cry, echoing from somewhere nearby.

He snaps his bow together as he stumbles out of the park, blindly following the cry until he staggers down a dark alley, bow drawn and at the ready. He’s never used it as a weapon before, but he’s alone and afraid and willing to start now.

There’s a dog – a bloody mess of a golden retriever – limping and falling down the alley, crying each time it steps down on one of its front legs. It’s face is bloodied, body heaving as it pants, bloody saliva bubbling from its mouth, and it can’t see.

“Oh shit,” Clint mumbles, all thoughts of his weapon, his fear, all of it, gone. He falls to his knees beside the injured dog, murmuring soothingly and trying to calm it, but the dog is too far gone in terror and pain to listen.

Clint’s only got one thin jacket, but he pulls it off without a thought and wraps it around the dog, making a sling as best he can.

“C’mon,” he says, cradling the whimpering dog against his chest. “I’ll take care of you.”

He staggers to the nearest animal hospital and pushes all of his dirty, crumpled savings across the desk without a thought.

The dog’s been beaten, the vet tells him. Broken leg, cracked ribs, head injuries. Both eyes damaged but they’ve managed to save the vision in one. He’s got contusions and bruises and Clint calls him Lucky and promises that no one will ever hurt him again.

He thinks that maybe he can make it through a New York winter if he’s got Lucky by his side, and it’s not like he’s got a choice anymore anyway.

He starts dreaming again, soft and hazy and bittersweet, sometime around February, when he’s curled up with Lucky beside a garbage can fire. It’s a reluctant dream, details given sparingly, and all he gets is the impression of home and safety and warmth and when he wakes up, he’s not shivering anymore.

He’s not alone anymore – the echo in the back of his mind that reminds him of a home he’s never actually known is back, and he’s got Lucky, and not even the coldest winter can take that from him.

It’s a good way to start the day.  
*

It gets colder and Clint uses a large chunk of the panhandling money he’s gathered to get Lucky a coat and little doggy boots because it’s not Lucky’s fault that Clint is too much of a mess of a human being to get his shit together and get them somewhere to stay without the risk of frostbite.

Lucky is warm and Clint’s Salvation Army coat works just fine and he can’t have mittens anyway, because he needs his fingertips for his bow

The thing is, he doesn’t think he’s ever felt this cold.

And then, and then, and then.

It’s the coldest night he can remember, he’s curled up under the bridge, rubbing Lucky’s ears between his fingers and promising that one day, one day, they’ll be warm.

And someone stops in front of them and stares and Clint braces himself for another lecture from an animal rights activist who thinks that living on the streets is okay for teenaged boys but not for dogs, and how dare Clint thinks he can give Lucky the life he deserves, nevermind that the life he had before resulted in him being nearly beaten to death and left to die.

Instead, the sharp, pale, tall man who’s watching them says, “Well. This is fascinating. You, boy.”

Clint looks up into pale blue eyes and a staff with a swirling, icy stone on the top.

“You,” says the stranger, reaching out for Clint. “You’ve got heart.”

And then there is nothing but an aching and empty cold that is far blacker and deeper than any cold Clint has ever known.

He thinks he screams as he sinks down into it, but he’s alone in the echoing emptiness, and no one is there to hear him

*

Clint isn’t Clint, not for a long while. The only thing that isn’t ice cold is the blood on his hands and even then, it’s not warm enough to shake the chill from his bones.

It’s a blur of obedience and a single-minded sense of purpose and part of Clint is content with it. For the first time in his life, he has a purpose, a mission, a reason to exist, and it’s to do what he’s told and to help Loki do what he needs to do to make the world a better place.

Human beings were meant to be subjugated, and Clint is living proof of that.

He’s not inhuman, though; he still needs to sleep, and when he does, he dreams of faint, echoing hallways, shouting, a dog barking, and he wakes up calling for someone he can’t remember.

It doesn’t matter, though. He obeys. He does what he’s told. He is ruthless and efficient and brings down bodies and Heli-carriers and makes his master proud and for once in his goddamn life, that’s enough for him. He’s doing what he’s meant to do.

And together, he and Loki nearly do it. They nearly bring Earth to its knees.

And then a woman with cold eyes and flame red lips and hair blasts straight through the ice he’s been wrapped so carefully in. He does his best but he’s no match for her and she slams a fist into his face and blackness comes with a crack of bone and blood and Clint isn’t Clint any longer, and maybe it’s a bit of a relief.

*

He wakes up in a bright, clean, white room with no furniture other than the bed he’s pinned to, and his voice is hoarse from screaming.

A stranger is sitting beside him and for a long moment, he doesn’t recognize her.

Then he has a sharp flash of a memory -- her fist cracking his nose. It’s been broken before and he recognizes the dull throbbing.

“How do you know Steve?” she asks.

Clint stares at her and swallows hard because it’s not an order, it’s a question, and he can’t remember how to function without orders anymore.

He stays silent, watching her with wide, hunted eyes that dart around the room, looking for Barney or Loki or some place to hide.

The door slides open soundlessly and another stranger is there, a man. “What I want to know,” he says, voice smooth and sharp like his face isn’t bruised all to shit. “Is what he’s doing with Bucky Barnes’ driver’s license.”

“Bucky,” Clint echoes, latching onto the word like a life preserver. His breathing hitches and he curls his hands into fists to hide their shaking.

The woman’s eyes narrow. “So that name you recognize?” she asks. “How do you know him?”

Clint shakes his head, lips pressed tightly shut, nose throbbing. He doesn’t know what’s happening or why and he’s afraid but he’s damned well not going to tell them anything until someone tells him to.

“Captain Rogers is on his way, sir,” a voice says, echoing through the white room, and Clint jumps, heart pounding, eyes flickering desperately around the room. There’s no one else there, and the two strangers don’t seem worried by the bodiless voice.

It’s only a few minutes later that the door slides open again and another stranger – this one tall and broad and wearing a uniform Clint doesn’t recognize – walks into the room like he owns it.

He looks at Clint, frowning, and says, “This can’t be the guy who took down the heli-carrier. He’s just a scared kid.”

He’s not a kid but Clint doesn’t say anything, just struggles to breathe.

“With a bow and arrow,” the other man says. He’s studying his nails, looking casual. “Took out 37 agents.”

Clint doesn’t know what that means but he knows it can’t be true. 

“And he knows you. He was screaming while he was out – calling for you, Steve.” The woman shakes her head. “He’s not as helpless as he looks.”

The man – Steve? – steps closer, frown growing. “You know me?” he asks.

For a long moment, Clint isn’t going to reply, but then he shakes his head just once and says hoarsely, “No.”

And the door slides open again and Clint looks up. His mind is echoingly empty for a moment and then something wrenches and he says, “Bucky.” His voice sounds shredded and he’s started to cry and he doesn’t even care, twisting and thrashing against the restraints. All he knows is that all the broken, bent pieces of him will fit back together the way they are supposed to if he can get to Bucky.

Bucky freezes in the doorway, eyes widening, fixed on Clint’s face. “Uh,” he says. “What?”

“Loki’s little helper seems to know you,” the other guy says, still casual, watching with vague interest.

“Please,” Clint cries, twisting against the cuffs as hard as he can. He hiccups on a sob and he can’t get free and he’s so fucking scared and confused.

“Pretty sure I’ve never seen that kid,” Bucky says, voice all soft Brooklyn syllables. “Though it’s a bit hard to tell, with the number you did on his face, Natasha.”

She shrugs, unrepentant, and Clint doesn’t care, growing more desperate to get free.

“Who are you?” Steve asks him, and Clint just thrashes violently and says, “I don’t _know_.”

He doesn’t know anything anymore and the fragile grip he’s got on this time and place is growing slippery, hard to hold onto, a mess of memory fragments and echoes that he isn’t sure were ever his at all.

“Okay,” Bucky says, quiet. He steps close to the bed, reaching out, wrapping his hand around Clint’s wrist – fingers pressed to the fingerprint bruises there, but Bucky’s hand is metal and it’s wrong and it’s cold and Clint is so fucking sick of being cold.

“It’s okay,” Bucky says, but it isn’t okay and it hasn’t been okay for a very long time.

Someone says something about his blood pressure, someone comes at him armed with a syringe and a clipboard and then there’s nothing left at all, not cold or fear or Bucky’s metal fingers pressed against his wrist.

Just nothing.

Clint prefers it that way.

*

“Clinton Francis Barton. Twenty-two years old, born in Waverly, Iowa. Both parents deceased. One brother, Barney. Both disappeared from the foster care system only to reappear in the Carson Carnival of Travelling Wonders. What I want to know is how a kid goes from circus act to sidekick to a trickster god.”

Clint swallows, throat clicking and dry, and blinks blearily up at the white ceiling. He flexes his shoulders but his arms are still bound. His head is muzzy, hazy with whatever drug they’d given him, and consciousness comes in fits and starts.

He lets his head roll to the side to blink at the guy sitting there, reading from a tablet.

“Eighteen,” he says, voice hoarse. “I’m just eighteen.”

“Uh, not according to your file,” the guy says. He shrugs a shoulder lazily and checks his tablet again. “I don’t blame you for losing track of time, though. It’s gotta be hard to keep track of the details when you’re killing dozens of people in an effort to help a god try to take over the world.”

It’s hazy for a moment, and then something cracks in his memory, unleashing a flood of images – of people screaming, of aiming his bow, not at a target but at a person – multiple people – so many people, his bow runs red with blood and so do his hands.

“Hey. Hey,” the guy snaps, but Clint doesn’t hear it. He’s screaming, twisting against the restraints. And then sudden, the guy’s got a hard grip on Clint’s face, fingers digging into both cheeks, and he’s saying, “You want another dose of whatever they shot you up with before, keep screaming.”

Clint tears his face away and clenches his teeth and his eyes shut against the memories, forcing them back into the cold place he can still feel deep in his mind. His chest is heaving and his face is wet with tears and he doesn’t know what’s happening at all or how to make it stop.

“We understand each other?” the guy says. “Good.”

Clint licks his cracked lips and says faintly, “Where’s Bucky?”

He doesn’t know Bucky from a goddamned hole in the ground but somehow, Bucky feels like the only stable thing in a world spinning wildly out of control.

“Not here.” The guy sits back down. “I’m Tony. Stark.”

He pauses like he expects some sort of recognition, but Clint’s got none to give.

Tony rolls his eyes. “They’re trying to get in touch with Thor, to try to figure out why your eyes keep doing that thing.”

Clint wasn’t aware his eyes were doing anything, but that’s hardly surprising. Reality is proving increasingly difficult to get a firm grip on.

The door slides open and that other guy – Steve – is there. “Bruce is looking for you,” he says, and Tony gets up, gives him a firm lecture on not undoing the restraints, and leaves the room.

Steve studies Clint for a few moments before taking Tony’s chair at his bedside, humming faintly in disapproval when Clint has to squeeze his eyes closed against a rising tide of hazy, dreamlike memories of someone who looks very much like Steve – though not nearly as big – in math class, at pep rallies, hanging out at the 7-11, laughing and shouting and racing to the edge of the block and back.

Stupid suburban memories that Clint never actually got to have.

“You keep calling out for me when you’re dreaming,” Steve says finally. “But I don’t know you. Do you know why?”

Clint opens his eyes and says miserably, “You used to be smaller.”

Steve just watches him, frowning, and then he gets up and starts yanking at the restraints. “Don’t make me regret this,” he says. “But keeping crying kids tied up isn’t what I signed up to fight for.”

When he’s free, all Clint does is curl unto his side, rolling his shoulders to try to ease the ache there, wrapping his arms around his knees, hugged to his chest. He’s shivering.

“You need anything?” Steve asks, handing over a bottle of water. “Hungry?”

“Cold,” Clint mumbles, and Steve nods, promises a blanket, and leaves the room.

Clint drifts off to sleep and when he does, he dreams of Steve, bigger now, and a guy with a magical hammer, and a giant green rage monster, and Lucky, in the middle of it all, wagging his tail.

Nothing makes fucking sense anymore.

He wakes up under three heavy blankets tucked up to his chin and it doesn’t do anything to help the cold he still feels in his fingertips.

*

“So I’ve been thinking.”

Startled, Clint sits up so fast, his head spins. Bucky is sitting in the chair, pushed back against the wall now, watching Clint speculatively, absently flipping a knife through his fingers, over his knuckles, back again.

Clint doesn’t say anything, and at his silence, Bucky continues. “The circus. Tony said you were with the circus. Right?”

It seems very far away, but Clint remembers the ringleader, the big top, the elephants. He nods warily.

He can’t pull his gaze away from the knife -- he doesn’t know how to use a knife. He’d never been a knife-thrower. That had never been his act.

But his hands seem to vividly recall the way a knife felt between his fingers, as he punched it into flesh, as blood ran over the blade and over his hands again and again and again.

He swallows back the nausea and forces himself to look away.

Bucky slips the knife into a sheath and says, “And then… Where did you go?”

Clint closes his eyes, breathes, sorts through overlapping memories, desperate to please Bucky and figure out the right answer in a way that only rivals what he’d felt with Loki -- he shies away from remembering that.

“New Jersey,” he says, voice faltering a little. “And then New York.”

Bucky’s eyes narrow. “Central Park,” he says, and it should be a question, but it’s not. He’s quiet again, clearly thinking something through, and then says abruptly, “Sometimes you wake up and your eyes are burning blue and you’re not yourself.”

Clint laughs shakily. “I’m barely myself even when I am myself,” he says.

“And if Loki’s magic is enough to turn the entire NYPD against itself… I’m willing to bet that it can do a pretty decent number on a street kid living under a goddamned bridge.”

Clint frowns, trying to piece together whether he’d ever told Bucky about the bridge he could only barely remember now, but he doesn’t think he did.

“So here’s the thing.” Bucky gets up abruptly, kicking his chair back, and Clint flinches at the sound. “I think… I think I’ve been looking for you,” he says, sounding distracted as he goes towards the sliding door. “For a while. For a long time. Since before Loki. Before… Well, before. And. I don’t know if I’m the only one? But I’ve been having these dreams -- circus dreams, who the fuck dreams of the circus. I mean, at least let me dream of being a goddamned acrobat, but no, they’re all these dreams about shooting -- a fucking bow and arrow, even. And then Tony pulls up this picture and it’s of you, The Amazing Hawkeye, just a kid at this circus grinning in front of a fucking bullseye that I’ve been seeing in my dreams since… since high school. And I don’t know what that means. But what I do know is that four years ago, I just. Went to Central Park. In the middle of the goddamned night. Because I just… I just had to?”

He opens the sliding door and lets out a sharp, piercing whistle and then says, “So explain that to me, okay? And while you’re at it, explain how I knew just where to go to find this guy, and how I already knew his goddamned name was Lucky, and how I knew I was just… he wasn’t mine. I was just holding onto him for a while.”

And then there is a blur of golden fur and a frantic cry and Lucky is barrelling into the room and throwing himself up onto Clint’s bed, a trembling, shaking, excited mess of a dog who doesn’t seem to know whether he wants to cry or lick every inch of Clint’s face or wag his tail so hard, his entire body is shaking with it.

It’s instant -- one moment, Clint is confused and he’s scared and every memory is a hazy mess. And then Lucky is in his arms and the only thing Clint knows for sure anymore is that this is his dog and if Bucky has been taking care of his dog, holding onto his dog and keeping him safe for Clint, than he doesn’t have to be scared anymore. He’s safe -- Lucky is safe -- and Bucky somehow made that happen. 

Nothing else matters.

“I thought so,” Bucky says, sounding just a little bit satisfied. “Dog’s been frantic since we dragged you in here. He’s yours?”

Clint’s a wreck -- his mind is filled with echoes and holes he can’t explain and he’s pretty sure if he pokes at those holes too hard, he’ll remember things he’d rather forget. But there’s one thing he knows -- Lucky’s coat is soft and shiny, he’s happy, he’s been well-cared for. He’s even a little chubby.

He certainly hasn’t been cold since Clint left him.

So Clint wraps his arms tight around Lucky and clings and forces himself to say, “He’s not mine.” Bucky lifts an eyebrow but doesn’t argue, so Clint closes his eyes and adds, “Or, he’s more yours than mine.”

Because Lucky deserves to be warm. Clint isn’t sure he deserves that much himself, if he ever did.

Bucky laughs a little. “Okay,” he says, but he doesn’t sound like he believes him.

“Sergeant Barnes,” the ceiling says, and Clint clings more tightly to Lucky, who doesn’t seem startled at all. “Thor is on his way down.”

“Thanks, Jarvis,” Bucky says, and he comes closer, stroking Lucky’s face -- the dog nearly collapses, he’s so happy with this development, but he doesn’t move from Clint’s embrace. 

“Listen,” Bucky says. “Thor’s probably going to be able to figure out what’s going on here. He’s more familiar with -- with Loki’s magic. With Loki himself.” He grimaces. “He’s Loki’s brother.”

Clint probably would have panicked at that, would have tried to run, but Lucky is a warm weight holding him down, and Clint’s not yet ready to leave him behind. 

Bucky must hear the hitch in his breathing, though, because he adds, “Steve’s probably already given you some sort of self-righteous speech about how we don’t lock up kids. So don’t worry -- all this is just a precaution, to figure out what happened to you and if you’re a danger to anyone. But no matter what happens, I am not going to let anyone hurt you.” He hesitates for a moment and then adds, “I don’t think I can.”

Before Clint can panic, the door slides open and the biggest guy he’s ever seen, muscles upon muscles, is stepping into the room which feels much smaller now that he’s there, followed by Tony and Steve. He’s laughing at something Tony is saying, and then he glances over, catches Clint staring at him, and abruptly looks much more serious.

“Here’s your little brother’s sidekick,” Tony says.

Thor frowns and steps closer and says, “That’s not all he is. There’s magic wrapped all around him.”

Thor reaches out like he’s going to touch Clint’s face and Clint flinches. “Don’t touch me,” he snaps, starting to shake. There are too many people watching him, too many people trying to touch him, and he doesn’t know where he is or what’s happening, just that Lucky’s been taken away and Bucky has stepped back and he’s somehow missing a chunk of his life and he can’t warm himself up for the life of him and it’s too much, too strange, too terrifying.

Thor glances at Tony apologetically and says, “It will be easier to trace if he were unconscious.”

“Someone get the drugs,” Tony says, and then there’s a nurse reaching to touch and Clint twists away and starts screaming.

“Hey, hey,” Bucky says suddenly, appearing in front of him. “Hey, I got you. You’re fine. Deep breath. I won’t let anybody hurt you.”

“Buck,” Steve says, disapproving, and Bucky ignores him. He doesn’t reach out to touch.

“Trust me,” Bucky says, and Clint has no reason to trust him, except -- except he feels like he knows him.

And then there’s a quick pinch and the sting of an injection and Clint should be used to being knocked out by now, but unconsciousness is still somehow a surprise.

*

He wakes up somewhere else and by now, he’s almost used to the feeling that he has absolutely no bodily autonomy. Why should he have any control over where he is and what he’s doing and what others expect of him? He’s nothing. He hasn’t been anything for so long.

Where the other room was bright white and sterile, this room looks like an ordinary bedroom. It even has a window. Someone has tucked him in, even, layering at least three blankets on top of him.

He’s not warm, but at least he is beginning to feel his fingertips.

Lucky is curled up on the foot of his bed.

Clint gets up, staggering a bit on unsteady legs, and he makes his way to one of the two doors -- it’s locked, so that hasn’t changed, at least.

The other door leads to a bathroom with a shower, and Clint is nearly dizzy with the heady feeling of independence having his own goddamned bathroom gives him.

Afterwards, as he washes his hands, he looks up into the mirror, and freezes. It’s his face -- he remembers his face, the planes and angles, his jaw line. His nose is taped up, a kaleidoscope of bruises, and his hair is longer than he’s ever kept it, falling untidily over his forehead.

It’s his face but at the same time, it’s not.

He blinks and his eyes blaze a vivid and unnatural blue and then he blinks again and it’s gone.

Steve appears in the doorway, looking wary. “Thor says you might not know what’s going on,” he says.

“I’m pretty sure I told you that,” Clint says, leaning on the sink.

He makes his way back to the bed, sitting on the edge and petting Lucky’s head when Lucky wags his tail. Steve follows, leans against the bathroom doorway, and says, “He said you’re still wrapped up in Loki’s magic, but it should fade with time. He says Loki’s an expert at manipulation and mind control, that you probably weren’t responsible for what you -- for what happened.”

Clint is stroking Lucky’s ear, listening but not sure how to react. “What did I do?” he asks.

“What’s the last thing you remember?” Steve asks, clearly deflecting.

Clint hesitates, sorting carefully through what he recalls. “I bought Lucky a coat,” he says softly. “It was cold. Winter. We were in the park and it was dark and a guy -- tall and sharp -- showed up and looked at me and. He said I have heart. And then there are other memories -- shooting. And blood. And screaming.” He looks up at Steve and says pleadingly, “But none of that was real.”

“That was when you were 18?” Clint nods and Steve continues, “Four years ago.”

Clint shakes his head because he’s not ready to deal with what that means. 

“Thor says that Loki’s magic, to do what it did to you and for so long, you’d already need to be vulnerable. Your... mind, I guess? Would already need to be open to manipulation. He followed the traces of Loki’s magic in your mind and he… found something else.” He grimaces. “Sorry, this is all new to me. He said it wasn’t familiar, whatever was there before. Do you… have any idea what it could be?”

“Do I have any idea what sort of magic was in my brain before Loki took it over?” Clint echoes, laughing a little hysterically. “No? Am I supposed to?”

Steve shrugs. “No idea, pal,” he says. “But you recognize me. And you seem to know Bucky. And Bucky… is going a little nuts at the idea that Natasha broke your nose, that Tony locked you up and kept shooting you up with drugs. He’s protective -- I mean, he’s always been protective of things -- people -- he loves. But he doesn’t even know you. And he’s been taking care of your dog for four years. What did you -- what are you? What did you do to Bucky?”

“Barely remember who I am, but I’m pretty sure I’m just ordinary,” Clint tells him, ducking down to curl up around Lucky. “Didn’t do anything to Bucky. Don’t think -- don’t think I ever saw him, even.”

“You seem to know him.”

“Afghanistan, right?” Clint asks, closing his eyes. “Where he lost his arm? There was a -- a truck. Filled with soldiers, driving down a dirt road. It smelled like… oil and gunpowder sweat. And then everything blew up and it was all blood -- I could taste the blood. And the screaming. And the pain.”

Steve looks haunted. “How do you --”

“Been dreaming of him,” Clint tells him, feeling sleepy. “The pain was so bad -- sometimes my arm still glitches out. S’why the circus didn’t want me.”

“We’re trying to find your brother,” Steve says.

“Don’t bother.” He startles a little when Steve tugs his blanket up over Clint’s shoulders, and then relaxes back into the warmth of it. “When’s Bucky coming back?”

“We’re not sure that’s a good idea,” Steve tells him.

Clint opens his eyes and blinking back tears and then says, “But I didn’t do anything to him, I swear I didn’t, I wouldn’t.”

“Just… sit tight. We’re trying to figure all this out.”

He locks the door on the way out.

*

They feed him and give him painkillers and tell him that they’ve got another magical expert coming in to give an opinion and Clint barely listens.

He’s going stir crazy, pacing the length of his room, staring out the window at the ground so far below. They take Lucky out for walks and Clint barely manages to restrain himself from begging to go too.

When Steve gets back with Lucky, he says, “You’re looking better. The swelling in your nose is easing a bit.”

Clint shrugs because he’s had worse, honestly, and says, “What happens next? Am I going to be locked up in here forever? I keep losing time, like, little bits of it. At first I wasn’t sure, I thought I was just falling asleep, but the sun keeps moving and sometimes I’m not even in bed.”

“Thor said Loki’s magic is still lingering, it might cause that, but it’ll fade now that he’s gone. For now just…” He wrinkles his nose. “Have a shower? I mean, if you want. I can get you clothes or whatever, if you want to change. You should probably change.”

Clint stares at him, startled, because he never even thought about the shower in the bathroom. He’s so used to living on the streets where showering was a luxury he barely got to experience -- he probably stinks.

“Right,” he says. “Shower. Okay.”

Steve smiles at him encouragingly and leaves and Clint warily goes into the bathroom.

He strips slowly, staring at his arms and his legs, his skin, like it’s all new to him. Like he hasn’t seen his body in four years -- or more. Living under a bridge doesn’t really give a guy much time to strip naked and Clint stares at his feet, his knees, the insides of his arms and tries to recognize them but he can’t.

He can’t recognize his body at all.

“It’s just the dirt,” he mumbles to himself. “And the blood. I’ve just got to get clean.”

He turns the shower on as hot as it will go and steps into the water, flinching but refusing to cool it down.

He scrubs and he scrubs and he scrubs and he still can’t get the blood off his hands.

The water eventually goes cold, and that makes it worse, so he stumbles out of the shower, catching his balance on the sink. The mirror is foggy and he rubs at it with his fist and then stares, because he doesn’t recognize the face staring back at him. He knows it’s his face, but he doesn’t recognize it, even as the swelling and bruising around his nose begins to heal. His face is too old, his eyes are too blue -- it’s not him, it can’t be him.

His eyes flicker, glowing that eerie shade again, and he starts to scream, lashing out at the stranger in the mirror. He slams his fist into the glass, again and again, even after it shatters and the shards slice up his hands.

It’s just more blood and he’s already covered in blood.

Reality flickers in and out and then it’s gone and everything is silent and still and he feels his body slip away and it wasn’t his body anyway, so he’s okay with it.

He’s drifting through hazy memories of laughing with Steve when Steve was small, splashing on the shore of a river somewhere, when reality comes back with a snap as his head slams back.

Someone is shaking him.

It takes Clint an embarrassingly long time to piece reality back together again -- Steve’s not there, he isn’t Bucky, he’s not splashing in a river. 

He’s Clint. He’s locked in a room and he doesn’t even know where. He’s older than he’s supposed to be. And he lost control of his body again.

“Barton,” Natasha snaps. He shoves weakly at her hands and she stops shaking him, though she doesn’t relax her grip on his shoulders. “You with me?”

Clint’s breathing hard and his hands are dripping with blood. He’s also, he realizes, naked. “What’s happening to me?” he asks.

“You broke the mirror and you were screaming,” she tells him. “Your eyes were glowing.”

“I wasn’t me,” he tells her. She lets him go, shoving a towel at him, and then grabbing it back before he can take it with his bloody hands.

“Sit,” she snaps, wrapping the towel around his shoulders. He sits numbly on the closed toilet seat and she pulls out a first aid kit and begins cleaning the gashes on his hands. “Steve’s gone to get something to clean up the glass. You sit here until it’s gone. I don’t want to waste my time cleaning up your feet, too.”

Clint shivers and tries his best not to flinch while she rubs alcohol over his hands. “I was trying to wash the blood off,” he tells her.

“You did a shitty job,” she says, and then she rolls her eyes. “Listen. I know what it’s like, when the blood won’t come off. When you’ve done things you don’t want to think about.”

He waits for her advice, because it feels like she’s about to tell him how to deal with it, but she falls silent. Maybe she’s just never figured out how to get the blood out from under her fingernails.

Finally, after someone has come and swept up the glass and Natasha has herded him back to bed, she says, “Wanda will be here in a few hours. If it turns out that you aren’t responsible for what Loki did, than you’ll be free to go home.”

“To the bridge in Central Park?” he asks as he accepts the soft, clean pajamas she hands him, holding them with clumsily bandaged hands.

She purses her lips and then says, “Just between you and me, if you play your cards right, you can send Tony into such a guilt trip for drugging you up so many times, I’m sure he’ll help you out with that. An apartment, a decent job, whatever.” She shrugs and turns to go, adding over her shoulder, “Sorry about the nose, by the way. If you need anything, ask Jarvis.”

“Jarvis?” he echoes.

“Tony’s AI. He let us know you were in distress in the bathroom, he’ll let us know if you need anything.”

Then she’s gone and Clint curls back into bed, Lucky hopping up to join him.

It’s quiet, and after a moment, Clint says carefully, “Jarvis?”

“Yes, sir?”

“I don’t suppose there’s, like. A TV in here?”

“Of course, sir.”

A cupboard in the wall, one Clint wasn’t even aware could move, slides to the side, revealing just about the largest television he’d ever seen.

“Does it play Dog Cops?” he asks wistfully, remembering hazy dreams of Bucky and Steve watching Dog Cops, though he’d never gotten to see more than a few moments of each episode.

Dog Cops starts playing and Clint settles in to watch and wonders if maybe he can guilt Tony enough to get to stay. 

It’s warm and it’s safe and there’s a TV and Bucky’s somewhere, he’s sure, and Lucky is here too.

It seems far too much to ask for.

*

Clint finally gets to see Bucky again the next day. The door flies open without warning and Bucky strides in, scowling. He’s holding a plate with half burned, half raw pancakes on it and he drops it on the table.

“Listen,” he says. “Before they come and kick me out. Natasha says you hurt your hands. What the fuck, Barton. Do you need stitches?”

Clint blinks at him and then looks down at his hands, covered in bandaids. “No?” he says. “The mirror broke. It was an accident.”

He snorts. “An accident. That shattered a mirror and sliced up your hands. Sure. Here.” He shoves the plate at Clint and Clint takes it, still watching Bucky closely. He feels a little tremor in his hands easing -- it’s like he’d been in withdrawal, not having Bucky near.

It should scare him, but he’s got so much scaring him, it’s barely worth the effort.

“Why won’t they let you in here?” he asks, taking a tentative bite of the pancakes when Bucky looks at them pointedly.

“Because there’s some magic shit going on,” Bucky says. “Apparently you’re vulnerable and they’re worried I might be a persuasive influence on you or whatever. Tony’s also pretty sure you’re up to some sort of magical bullshit and is worried you’re going to brainwash me or something.” He rolls his eyes. “They think it’s for the best if I stay away.”

“I don’t think it is,” Clint says, earnest. “Lucky misses you like crazy. And when you’re not around, I feel like tearing out of my skin.”

“With the bathroom mirror?” Bucky asks, sarcastic. “Try not to kill yourself while we figure this out.”

Clint takes another bite of disgusting pancake because he’s listening -- he’s being good.

“Wanda’s a witch,” Bucky tells him abruptly. “She’ll wave her hands, there’ll be floaty red shit, she’ll probably invade your mind in terrible ways, but she’ll be able to figure this out. And then we’ll fix it. I won’t let her hurt you. Okay?”

Clint wants to say no, to tell Bucky that he doesn’t want anybody in his mind, ever again, but he feels like he lost the right to say no a long time ago. Besides, he’s not sure he could ever say no to Bucky and he doesn’t know why.

“Okay,” he says quietly.

“Okay.” Bucky nods and then sits on the foot of his bed, watching him take carefully measured bites until the pancakes are gone.

Wanda shows up a short while later, appearing with Tony and Steve, who both look a little harried and try to lecture Bucky for sneaking in to see Clint, but Bucky just levels a scary glare at them and they give up.

“Ready?” Bucky says, shooting Wanda a look. “Don’t hurt him.”

“This isn’t going to hurt,” Wanda says, and it sounds like a lie, but before he can brace himself, Wanda is standing before him, her hands up, and that swirly red magic he was warned about wraps itself around Clint’s face, tightening and tightening until it’s all he sees and it runs like blood.

There’s a rushing sensation, an eerie tingling like fingernails running lightly over his skin, and then a soft sense of impact, and Clint isn’t sitting on the bed anymore. His head falls back and his eyes flare bright blue and he’s lost in a tangled mess of memory.

He’s standing on concrete that’s baking in the summer sun, staring down the sightline of his bow, fingers holding it steady and ready to fire as he takes aim at a monstrously huge flying ship of some kind, that nearly looks like a flying city. The air is burning when he inhales, he can feel the drawstring pulling at his fingers, he can hear the screams of the dying even before he fires.

Chunks of burning metal and flames fall on him after he fires his shot.

And then he’s running through dark hallways, somewhere industrial, and he recognizes the woman who appears out of the shadows, though he didn’t at the time. It’s Natasha, and they fight, and it’s brutal, but he gets the upper hand. He’s got her pinned, his hands around her throat --

And then he’s somewhere else and a stranger is begging for mercy and he doesn’t hesitate, just shoots an arrow between her eyes and walks away before she hits the ground.

And then he’s picking a lock and it’s child’s play -- he’s been picking locks since his circus days. The door swings open and he steps inside and already, people are screaming and running because Loki is right behind him. It only takes seconds for all of them to fall silent, except for the soft, wet gasps as they try to breathe through their blood.

And then he’s methodically beating, twisting, breaking a man strapped to a chair while Loki circles him, talking in riddles that Clint never bothered to understand.

And on and on and on until he feels his body is coated in blood, drowning in blood, and still so, so cold -- and then suddenly, he’s sitting under a bridge with Lucky and things are infinitely sweeter and simpler and all he cares about is keeping Lucky safe and warm.

He meanders through memories of struggling to find food and shelter but his hands are clean and his heart is light, and he goes back and back and back until he’s at the circus, slicked up with grease paint and grinning fiercely beside Barney, the Amazing Hawkeyes.

And he’s picking pockets and working crowds and it’s all burned popcorn and cotton candy and a manic sort of desperation in Barney’s crooked grins --

And then, there. He’s tripping, tumbling, and suddenly caught and staring up into Bucky Barnes’ pretty eyes and Bucky’s saying, “I know you. You’re the archer.”

And that’s right. That’s who Clint is -- he’s the archer. He’s the boy with Bucky’s hands around his wrist, leaving marks that won’t ever fade. He was nothing and then here, at this specific moment, he becomes something -- becomes marked by Bucky’s hands.

It’s infinitely simple but seems too vast to be understood.

And then he hears Wanda say, “Oh, is that what this is?”

And he blinks and he’s awake and the world feels more solid than it did before.

“What is it?” Bucky asks, and Clint shakes his head a little to clear it -- he can still taste burnt popcorn at the back of his throat.

“I know you,” he says, hoarse.

“You do?” 

“I picked your pocket at the circus.”

“The circus?” Steve says, catching Bucky by the shoulder as Bucky tries to come too close to Bucky. “What circus? We haven’t been to the circus, we--”

But Bucky says quietly, “High school. Me and you, Stevie, double date with those girls from Chemistry. Remember?”

“No,” Steve says, stubborn. “That’s ridiculous -- how can you possibly get cursed at a goddamned circus?”

“I’d think a circus would be the perfect place to get cursed,” Tony says helpfully. “You guys probably had some sort of psychic tarot-reading witch lady, right?”

“That’s incredibly offensive,” Wanda tells him, stepping away from Clint and looking concerned. “But it’s not a curse. It’s -- it’s a bond.”

“How do we break it?” Steve asks, and Clint can’t help a faint whimper at the thought.

“They can break it, if they choose,” she says. “But if it wasn’t serving them, they’d already have broken it. It’s like a -- the best way I can explain it is an echo. Sometimes there are specific souls that … recognize each other. And when they meet, a bond is formed. Most times, if not maintained with regular contact, it fades away, but sometimes it becomes a sort of foundation -- a safety net?” she shrugs a little, looking uncomfortable, her accent more pronounced as she struggles to explain. “An anchor for souls that struggle. That this bond is still so strong, after so many years, means that both souls needed that anchor.”

“So it’s like…” Tony trails off, mouth quirking like he finds this entire thing funny. “They’re soul mates.”

She hesitates and then nods and says, “That’s a simplistic way to see it, yes.”

“And that magical bond is what gave Loki a backdoor into Clint’s mind,” Bucky says.

Wanda looks at Clint, sympathetic, and says, “Yes. And he was not careful when he took you. He left so much scarring behind, you’ve only just begun to work your way through it.”

Clint looks down at his wrist, where bruises still mark the place where Bucky caught him as he fell. Feeling sick and stupid, like this is all his fault, he says miserably, “I’m real sorry, Bucky.”

“It’s fine,” Steve says. “We’ll break it and it’ll be fine. Right?”

Clint flinches at the idea but Bucky ignores it entirely, shouldering his way past Steve to get closer. “What are you sorry for?” he says, gruff. “Sounds like it was a mutual thing to me.”

“Bucky--” Steve starts.

“Dreaming of that circus is all that kept me sane overseas,” Bucky says quietly. “When we drove over that IED, everything after-- that’s all I had, Stevie.”

“It’s probably what helped Clint come back, after Loki’s magic,” Wanda adds. “With that amount of scarring, I’d think he’d just be a shell now.”

“But you don’t need it now,” Steve says, and Clint kind of agrees. It’s not fair to Bucky, is it, attached to Clint just because Clint got fucked over by Loki?

But before he can say anything, an alarm blares and he’d panic, if Wanda hadn’t taken his hand, squeezed it, and said, “Avengers alarm, breathe. You’re fine.”

Steve checks his phone, curses quietly, and then says, “AIM. Bucky, Tony, I need you with me on this.”

Bucky looks like he’s going to argue and Steve says, more firmly, “Buck. I need you.”

So with a quick look at Clint and a scowl, Bucky follows Steve out of the room. Tony follows with a lazy salute and a, “Duty calls, I guess.”

And then Wanda hesitates, like she’s not sure if she ought to follow or not, so Clint says, “You can go. I just -- I’m real tired.”

She flashes a quick, gentle smile and says, “Just give Steve time. He’s incredibly protective of Bucky and it clouds his judgement.”

She leaves, and Clint waits for a handful of minutes to ensure no one’s coming back, and then he says, uncertain, “Jarvis?”

“Yes, sir?”

“What’s AIM? And the Avengers?”

Jarvis explains and Clint feels worse and worse. Bucky’s a goddamned superhero somehow bonded to a street kid ex-circus carney? 

“I should go,” he says outloud, miserable.

“With all due respect, sir,” Jarvis says, helpful. “The door is still locked, and Sergeant Barnes would be upset if you did, as would Captain Rogers. With the nature of the attack on New York, until the safety of the public is assured, it wouldn’t be wise to leave the Avenger’s custody.”

But wouldn’t it be best for everyone if he just disappeared?

“What -- what did I do, Jarvis?” he asks, voice small. 

The television flickers on and there’s a newsfeed rolling, showing shaky camera footage of the battle of new york, of the burning helicarrier, of Clint standing surrounded by the dead, smiling. Of people running and screaming, buildings torn apart, and Bucky, Steve, Tony and others Clint doesn’t recognize fighting massive monsters. 

Clint flinches, closing his eyes, memories unleashed and crashing over him and it’s too much, too much blood and cold and too many people begging for mercy before he kills them without a thought.

It’s an echoing emptiness in his mind that Loki had filled with praise and orders and Clint had given everything to him willingly, obedient to the end.

Clint panics.

He’s gotta get out of here before it happens again, before he hurts anyone else, before he drags Bucky down with him.

*

Even with all his bandaids, it’s far too easy for Clint to loosen the bolts holding the air duct in place in the bathroom and pull it shut behind him. He can’t tighten it, but hopefully he’s long gone before anyone notices the cover is barely hanging on.

The vents are small, dark, and warm. It’s soothing, having only one or two directions at the most to crawl in. He doesn’t specifically have a plan -- just a hazy idea of crawling along until he finds a vent to the outside or to a maintenance room or something.

He passes a few vent covers that would drop him into a conference room, a laboratory, a hallway, but nowhere secret enough to aid in an escape, so he gets helplessly lost instead.

Suddenly the enclosed space, the stale air, inability to turn around and go back the way he came gets claustrophobic rather than soothing, and Clint’s breathing starts picking up with panic. He keeps crawling, time moving strangely until he has no idea how long he’s been lost in the vents.

“Jarvis?” he whispers but there’s no reply. Apparently there’s no AI in the vents.

He keeps crawling, a sense of helplessness making his movements frantic. He’s going to be trapped in here forever -- at some point, someone is going to find his stupid skeleton, dead and turning to dust, in this fucking air vent.

At least he won’t drag Bucky down with him. If he thinks about it, dying in an air vent in a high rise in Manhattan is a nicer death than he thought he’d have, sleeping under a bridge in Central Park.

Still, he can’t help feeling like he’s going to cry.

It’s almost a miracle when he sees sunlight ahead, filtering through a vent, and adrenaline and anxiety giving him the strength to kick his way free.

He tumbles into a glass encased alcove with sliding doors overlooking a helicopter pad and he’s pretty sure the door won’t open for him. It does though, sliding open silently, and he trips out into the bright sunlight and fresh air, covered in dust bunnies, his face sticky with tears.

He sucks in the crisp air, collapsing on the wall at the very edge of the roof, his feet hanging down over the edge, his hands holding tightly to the concrete.

He can’t breathe and he’s so far up, looking down makes him dizzy. He’s not afraid to fall, though. It doesn’t seem the worst possible outcome.

*

“You know what really pisses me off?”

Clint startles, twisting around to look over his shoulder, and Bucky is stalking out of the sliding doors, his hair blowing in the wind and his face set in a scowl.

“Bucky?”

“You left the goddamned dog. Lucky’s going crazy in your room while you’re up here making a fucking break for it or getting ready to jump off Stark’s fucking roof.”

“Wait,” Clint says, shaking his head. “That’s not--”

“Idiot,” Bucky snaps, stalking closer. “Air vents, really? You couldn’t just pick the goddamned lock and try to get out that way?”

“Thought I could get to, like. The laundry chute or something. What are you doing in here?” Clint scrubs at his sticky face with the back of his hand.

“Looking for you. What are you doing?”

“I was just getting air,” Clint says, which is only partially a lie. “I didn’t know you were back.”

“I just got back, and you know what, I had a shitty fucking day.” He’s growling but not coming closer, as if he’s scared of startling Clint or making him do something drastic. “You gonna come down from there?”

Clint looks back down at the ground so far below. He’d almost forgotten he was up this high, lost in thought and just… breathing.

“Oh,” he says vaguely. “I didn’t even… I just thought. I didn’t wanna drag you down with me.”

“Yeah?” he asks, voice sinking lower, rougher, as he steps closer. “You’ve been in my head since I was 17, Barton. How’d you think I’d have felt dreaming of you falling when I wasn’t here to catch you?”

He hadn’t really thought of that, and Clint suddenly feels so badly, he scrambles to turn around, to climb down off the wall. He’s shaky and distracted and uncoordinated and he slips, tumbling backwards, and of course he does, of course he fucking falls, what else was he gonna do? He’s a disaster of a human being and Bucky deserves better and Clint can’t even climb off a goddamned wall without making a fucking disaster of it.

He’s going to fall, he’s going to die, and Bucky’s going to be stuck reliving it in his dreams for the rest of his life.

But instead, Bucky reaches out, grabs him by the wrist, and jerks him to safety, eyes eyes going wide even as he snaps some curse word that Clint doesn’t hear.

He doesn’t hear anything at all -- just his own heart beat. All he feels is the places where Bucky’s fingertips are touching the bruises that have marked Clint’s wrist since he was a fifteen-year-old pickpocket.

“Oh,” he breathes, because Bucky’s touch is breaking through the bone-deep chill that Clint has felt since Loki took him, it’s warming him up from the inside, until the sound of Clint’s heart is echoed by Bucky’s. It’s like they’re beating together, breathing together, and Clint stares into Bucky’s wide eyes and thinks, this is it. This is what he’s been waiting for. This is the answer to the echoing cry he’s felt ever since that day when he’d first fallen and Bucky had caught him. The bond, which had been born that day and somehow survived on hazy dreams and half remembered touches, flares to life again and brings with it the sweetest, softest warmth and the realization that he’s not alone. Even in the moments where he felt more alone than anyone has ever been, Clint wasn’t alone, because Bucky had been searching for him, calling out for him.

“If you throw yourself off the goddamned roof, Clint Barton, I’m throwing myself off after you,” Bucky says, his voice just as breathless and airy as Clint feels. It sounds almost like a promise.

“That’s a little melodramatic,” Clint tells him, and Bucky rolls his eyes and jerks Clint against his chest and holds on, tight.

Clint shudders and fights the urge to cut and run. It takes a moment to let that instinct twist him up inside before he breathes in Bucky’s scent and suddenly, his insecurity and his fear and all the rest doesn’t matter. No one’s held Clint like this, not since before his parents’ died, and if Bucky wants to be the first, Clint’s not gonna fuck that up.

“You feel that?” he whispers, because he can still feel the echo of Bucky’s heart beating in his own chest. He warily slides his arms around Bucky’s waist, tucking himself up more closely against him.

Bucky just tightens his hold.

*

“So, you’re not a mass murdering assassin sidekick to a god who tried to take over the world,” Steve says, arms crossed over his chest and an impressive frown on his face, leveled at Clint. “But we still don’t know what you are.”

“Yeah we do,” Tony says, rolling his eyes. “He’s a street kid pickpocket former carney and also Bucky Barnes’ soulmate. What else do you need to know, Cap?”

“What to do with him?” Steve suggests.

Clint, honestly, doesn’t give a fuck what Steve decides. He’s curled up beside Bucky on a massive leather couch in the common area, he’s finally, for the first time in years, feeling warm, and he thinks maybe, if they just let him follow around after Bucky, he could maybe be something close to happy.

He won’t get in the way, or cause trouble, or even eat too much. They’ll barely know he’s there.

“He’s not going anywhere,” Bucky says, nice and easy. “He’s fine.”

Steve hesitates and then says carefully, “Buck, I’m not sure you can fix him.”

“Don’t need fixing,” Clint mumbles.

“See?” Bucky turns on the TV, discussion over, and Clint is more than capable of ignoring the worried looks and whispers of everyone else in the room.

*

Clint is doing so, so well. He’s putting all his energy into being practically invisible, to doing whatever he can to ensure that he’s not in anybody’s way, that he’s not annoying anyone, that he’s barely eating so that Tony doesn’t get mad at an increase in food costs and kick him out, because seriously, Clint has nowhere to go.

And Bucky is here. And Bucky is the only thing that makes waking up in the morning worth it. Other than Lucky, of course, but Lucky’s already proven that he does just fine without Clint around.

He knows that Steve and Tony are still worried -- they probably think that Clint isn’t good for Bucky, that Clint isn’t worth Bucky’s attention or his time and seriously, Clint is trying so, so hard not to take up too much of Bucky’s attention or his time. He doesn’t need much.

But he doesn’t have anywhere to go.

So he’s being good. He’s being so, so good. He’s quiet and he’s calm and he’s agreeable and he’s helpful -- he does the dishes. All the time. He makes coffee. He helps the custodial staff take out the garbage and he keeps his little room spic and span and he got Tony’s maid to teach him how to make his bed because he’d never had to learn that before.

He’s trying so hard.

Maybe if he keeps trying, he’ll get to stay.

And then one morning, Bucky asks him what he wants for breakfast.

It’s early. Bucky and Steve are heading down to the gym after breakfast for training, and Bucky is not a morning person. He’s scowly, his hair is a mess, he’s rubbing sleep out of his eyes and glaring balefully into the cupboard of cereal like he can’t for the life of him figure out why he’s awake this early.

And Clint is being good.

So he says, “Whatever you’re having.”

Bucky’s scowl deepens. “Frosted Flakes, Cheerios, Life, Captain Crunch, Froot Loops, or Walnut Clusters.”

Sitting at the table, Clint shifts anxiously and says, “Seriously, I’m good with --”

“Pick a fucking cereal!”

It’s stupid. It’s so stupid. Clint should have just picked -- he should’ve just -- Bucky is tired and irritated and doesn’t need to deal with Clint’s shit right now, it’s only goddamned cereal, he should’ve just picked one and not made him angry, he should’ve already gotten his fucking cereal, he shouldn’t have been waiting for Bucky at all, Bucky has more important things to do than deal with the fact that Clint can’t pick a goddamned cereal and even now, even fucking now, Clint is paralyzed by boxes of cereal -- he doesn’t know, he doesn’t know what Bucky wants him to pick and he doesn’t know what he wants to eat and he can’t breathe -- can’t think --

And Clint doesn’t know when thinking about cereal became a panic attack but he’s hyperventilating at the table, crying, gasping apologies between shuddering, wet sobs, and his arms are all scratched up and he thinks, half hysterical, that he must’ve done that.

Bucky’s kneeling in front of his chair, eyes wide and face pale, his hands holding Clint firmly by the wrist, probably to stop him from hurting himself.

“Hey,” he’s saying, urgent. “Clint, hey, breathe, it’s okay, it’s okay. It’s just cereal.”

“I don’t… I don’t know what you want,” Clint gasps, broken. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m trying to be good.”

Bucky shares a quick, panicked look over his shoulder -- Steve must be there, and of course Steve would see this. Now he’s going to send Clint away for sure, for upsetting Bucky.

“Shh,” Bucky says, tugging Clint into a tight hug. “You’re good, Clint, I promise, you’re good. It’s okay. Everything’s fine.”

But it’s not. Clint just knows it’s not. He’s made a scene, he’s gotten in the way, and now he’s going to be sent away, and he’s got nowhere to go.

*

They wait to tell him until that evening. Clint has spent most of the day in his room with Lucky, telling Bucky that he wasn’t feeling very well, which wasn’t specifically a lie. He’s even thrown the new clothes they’d given him -- three pairs of jeans, a sweater, two t-shirts, a pair of soft flannel pajamas, and an entire week’s worth of underwear -- in a plastic bag. He wanted to leave it behind, but he’s got nothing -- there’s no room for dignity.

Really, it’s just like leaving another foster home.

Bucky and Steve come in, though Steve stays by the doorway, arms crossed over his chest, looking awkward. Bucky sits beside Clint on the bed.

“I need you to listen,” he says, but Clint already knows what he’s going to say. “I wanted this to work out, but Steve’s right. It’s not good for you right now, being here with me.”

Clint clasps his hands together and stares down at them because he isn’t going to cry. He doesn’t say anything at all.

Bucky’s quiet for a minute, and Clint hears Steve sigh before coming to sit on the bed on his other side. “Listen,” Steve says, and Bucky reaches over, slides one hand over Clint’s. “You haven’t done anything wrong here. This isn’t your fault. Bucky’s not angry -- no one is angry. But this isn’t a good place for you right now -- you aren’t going to get better here.”

“I’m sorry,” Clint says finally. He winces at how broken his voice sounds.

Bucky makes a small, helpless sound. “Clint. I’m sorry. I tried, I didn’t realize --”

Clint finally turns to look at him, and despite his best efforts, his eyes are stinging with tears. “No, no, no, it’s not you, I know -- I know if I was better, then you’d let me stay. If I was quieter or smarter or better or if I just picked a fucking cereal--”

“Jesus,” Steve says, sounding just as rough as Clint feels. “No.”

Clint ignores him, and the tears that’ve started running down his face. “Just, Bucky, can I just -- I’ll go, but. But can Lucky stay here? It’s just so cold sometimes and he’s so happy here, and so healthy, and I can’t -- I just can’t keep him healthy like that and he deserves --” he hiccups and swears, pulling his hands away from Bucky and shaking his head. “He deserves to be warm. He’s a good boy, he’s the best boy, and I can’t--”

“Fuck. Steve.” Bucky shakes his head violently, getting up. “Steve, I can’t.” His voice cracks.

“Clint, listen to me, okay?” Steve touches Clint’s hand, wary, and Clint flinches away but turns towards him, rubbing at the tears on his face. “We aren’t -- we’re not kicking you out. We’re sending you away, to get help. Loki messed around in your head and Wanda said he left scars all over the place and the last thing you need right now is Bucky accidentally messing you up even more. You haven’t been you for so many years -- you need to figure out who you are without the bond with Bucky messing that up. Okay? But we aren’t just sending you away -- you aren’t going back to Central Park. And you’re taking your damned dog.”

Glancing over at where Bucky is glaring out the window and angrily rubbing away his own tears, Clint says uncertainly, “How long?”

“Until you can tell me to fuck off the next time I’m a dick to you about your cereal choices, probably,” Bucky says, coming back to collapse backwards on the bed beside him.

Clint hesitates for a really long time, staring at Bucky sprawled out on the bed beside him. Finally, carefully, he says, “I really like Count Chocula, I think. Turns the milk chocolatey.”

Surprised, Bucky laughs up at him, smiling fondly. “Yeah?” he says. “That’s good, Barton. I’ll get Tony to stock it in the kitchen.”

“For when I come back?” Clint asks hesitantly.

“Yeah,” Steve says, reaching out to squeeze his shoulder and dropping his hand before the touch goes on too long. “For when you come back.”

“And Tony’s already calibrating a StarkPhone for you, so we can keep in touch. We can talk every night, if you want, and you can text me whatever. Okay?” Bucky sits up, suddenly earnest. “You’re not losing me -- I’m not letting you go now that I’ve finally found you. Okay?”

“Okay,” Clint agrees, letting out a tight breath. “Okay. Where… if I’m not going back onto the streets, where am I going?”

“I know a guy in D.C.,” Steve says. “Sam. He’ll take care of you.”

Clint’s mouth twists -- he doesn’t know if he can trust a stranger to help him figure himself out.

Before he can panic about it, Bucky squeezes his wrist, fingers pressed right where those shadow marks from the first time they touched still linger.

“I trust Sam,” Bucky says. “He helped me out after I got blown all to hell. I trust him with you. You trust me?”

“Yes,” Clint says, automatic.

Bucky smiles, approving, and Clint feels a thrill of warmth in his chest. “Good. You’ll be okay.”

If it means he gets to come back, Clint’s certainly willing to try.

*

Clint’s never flown before, not that he can remember, but he doesn’t think commercial airfare would compare to the quinjet experience.

He says goodbye to Bucky in the hangar, and it’s awkward and weird because really, they don’t know each other all that well, though it feels like they do. They hug and Clint tries to memorize every moment of that hug because he’s pretty sure it’s going to be a long, long time before anybody else touches him, and probably longer still before Clint is able to let them.

“Text me,” Bucky says, and Clint’s never actually had a cell phone before, but Bucky’d given him a quick lesson on it and he’s pretty sure he can figure it out.

“I will,” Clint tells him.

“And don’t sit around worrying that you’ll be bugging me if you text me, I want you to text me, I wish you could stay with me, I want to hear from you, even if I’m sleeping. You need me, you reach out. You want me, same thing. You feel lonely? Think of something funny? See a weird-shaped dog shit? See a cute dog? Find Lucky a girlfriend? Don’t care. I want to know. Okay?”

Bucky’s hands are still on Clint’s shoulders, forcing Clint to make eye contact, and he says, “Yeah. I promise.”

“And if I get annoying, tell me to fuck off. Deal?”

“You’re not annoying,” Clint tells him.

“You’ve never had to deal with half a dozen bar bathroom selfies after a tequila bender,” Steve says dryly. “My number’s in there too, if you need anything.”

“And I’ll call you,” Bucky promises. “And visit. When Sam says it’s a good idea.”

“Soon,” Clint says hopefully.

“Soon as I can.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

They keep looking at each other. Bucky’s hands are warm on Clint’s shoulders, even the metal one, his thumbs stroking Clint’s upper arm, and Clint isn’t gonna be the first one to pull away here.

Finally, Steve nudges Bucky with his hip and says, quiet, “We gotta go, Buck. Coulson’s looking for us.”

“Yeah,” Bucky says. He breathes and Clint breathes with him and then he steps back. “Nat’s gonna fly you to DC and stick around for a while,” he says. “She’s scary, but she’ll make sure no one gets hurt. See you soon.”

“See you,” Clint says faintly, and then Bucky straightens his shoulders, clenches his jaw, and walks away. His step falters a bit at the door, but Steve slings an arm around his shoulder and squeezes and Bucky keeps walking and then he’s gone.

“We’re good,” Clint tells Lucky, who’s sitting patiently at his feet. “We’re okay.”

“We’re going to be late,” Natasha says from the jet.

Clint turns and climbs aboard, Lucky following.

*

“You and your friends give out bedrooms like Halloween Candy.”

Bucky laughs a bit. “What do you mean?”

“I never had my own room before Tony’s tower,” Clint tells him, stretching out on his new bed, staring up at the ceiling, phone pressed to his ear. “And now Sam’s given me one too.”

“Jesus,” Bucky says. He’s not laughing anymore. “You deserve your own goddamned bedroom, Clint.”

“Yeah, well. Foster homes didn’t really have room for both me and Barney, so we shared. It was okay, though. It was nice, not being alone. And then we had a trailer together, in the circus. And after, well…” He trails off because he doesn’t want to talk about living on the streets, and he feels like he’s babbling anyway.

Bucky let’s the silence linger for a moment and then says, “How’s it going?”

“The shadows are weird,” Clint says and then he winces. He’s been tracing the strange patterns they make on his new bedroom ceiling absentmindedly while talking to Bucky, but he’s pretty sure that’s not what Bucky wants to hear about. “I mean, it’s good. Sam made dinner. He’s a pretty good cook. He asked what I liked to eat but I couldn’t think of anything so he made two things -- French toast and mac and cheese. Then we ate both and discussed which was better.”

“And?”

“French toast. Definitely French toast.”

“Mmm. What about the shadows?”

Wrinkling his nose, Clint says, “It’s just, the trees, you know? And the moon. And the streetlights. And sometimes cars go by, and everything movies, and I just. It’s different than in the tower. And sometimes it makes it seem like… like the trees are moving.”

Bucky mumbles in sleepy agreement and then says, “That why you called?”

“No,” Clint says, and it’s not really a lie.

“What’s up?”

“Nothing.”

“It’s 2 am. I mean, I said you could call or text whenever, and I stand by that. But I’m gonna assume something’s going on if you’re not sleeping and it’s the middle of the night.”

Clint screws up his face and holds his breath and tries to think of some way to deflect Bucky’s attention, and then he huffs out a sigh and says, “Bad dream.”

“That’ll happen in a new place,” Bucky says, warm and sleepy and not annoyed. “You wanna talk about it?” 

“No,” Clint tells him.

“Okay,” Bucky says, nice and easy. “Whenever I had nightmares after the IED, Stevie would tell me stories from when we were kids. You wanna hear one of those?”

Clint thinks he should say no. He thinks he should let Bucky get back to sleep and stop taking up his time and attention. And then he remembers the cereal he couldn’t pick and now much better it felt to decide that he liked French toast over mac and cheese.

“Yes,” he says softly. “Please.”

Bucky sounds pleased when he starts to talk, voice a low rumble, telling Clint about the time Steve picked a fight in the school yard with the biggest bully he could find after the guy had made Bucky’s sister Becca cry.

He talked until Clint drifted off to sleep, this time without nightmares of being slowly frozen from the inside out and floating in a sea of blood.

*

Sam’s place has a backyard.

A fucking backyard.

Lucky loves it -- there’s room to run and shrubs to rummage through and gardens to dig up and it’s safe and secure and he isn’t cooped up in a high rise or huddled with Clint in downtown New York.

His first morning in D.C., Clint wakes up just before noon and stumbles outside to find Sam lecturing an unrepentant Lucky over some damage done to his magnolias, and as soon as it sinks in that Lucky has destroyed something that matters to Sam, Clint freezes and goes cold all over.

“I’ll fix it,” he says quickly, words tripping over themselves. “I’ll plant new ones. I’ll put them back together. I’ll -- I’ll dig a new flower bed or -- or -- Just don’t hurt Lucky.”

Sam turns and stares at him and Natasha, seated in the shade of a large umbrella in a cushy looking chair, sips her coffee and drawls, “He’s not going to hurt your dog, Barton. Calm down.” She turns a page of her magazine.

“Of course not,” Sam says, rolling his eyes. He kicks a chair at the little patio table out for Clint and says, “Sit. I’ll get you coffee. Your dog’s a menace. But we don’t hurt dogs here, Clint. Not even for gross destruction of property.”

“Don’t be melodramatic,” Natasha says, rolling her eyes. “Your magnolias haven’t bloomed in two years.”

Sam grins. “I’m not the best gardener,” he admits as Clint warily takes his spot. “You take cream? Sugar?”

He gets up and disappears into the house before Clint can answer, returning with a steaming mug, a sugar bowl, and a delicate little cup of cream. 

“Fix it however you like it,” he says, like it’s not a big deal. Tony’s tower had fancy machines that let him customize his coffee however he liked and Clint had always been so intimidated, he’d taken whatever the last setting had been.

Quiet falls as Clint experiments with his coffee, adding sugar and cream in tiny increments and taking sips to test it out, and neither Sam nor Natasha pay any attention. It’s nice. There are birds singing and bees humming and Lucky, now that he’s not being lectured, has flopped under the shade of a tree out by the back gate, still covered in dirt and the remains of Sam’s plants.

“He’s a good dog,” Sam says finally, when Clint’s settled in to finish his overly sweet coffee.

“The best dog,” he says.

“And you’re a good kid.”

Clint isn’t so sure about that, so he stays quiet.

The quieter he is, the more he can feel the echo of Bucky’s heart beating in his own chest, and it’s soothing. Sometimes he thinks he can feel echoes of Bucky’s emotions, too, and they’re usually just soft brushes of warmth, amusement, humor, or faint pricks of irritation -- probably at Tony. Bucky usually seems irritated at Tony.

It’s nice.

*

“So.”

They’re in Sam’s home office, Sam’s sitting behind a desk, spinning a pen absently and studying Clint, who is nervously perched on a sofa by the door. There are six potted plants in here, all in various stages of decay, and Clint itches to get up and water them.

The sun spills through the window, bringing with it the distant sound of birdsong.

Clint squirms a little, pulls his feet up and tucks them underneath himself, chewing his bottom lip for a moment, tugging at his hair, and squirming again.

Finally, he says, “Is this how, like. Therapy’s supposed to go?”

Sam smiles. Clint’s a pretty big fan of Sam’s smiles because they seem easy, uncalculated. He’s not used to not having to read into smiles but Sam’s seems uncomplicated and sincere.

“Is that what you want?” Sam asks. “Therapy?”

Clint’s pretty sure that’s the last thing he wants, but if that’s what Bucky wants him to do -- why he sent him to Sam -- he’s willing to do it. “I didn’t think I had much of a choice,” he says finally.

“Course you do,” Sam says, dropping his pen and sitting up, leaning on his desk a bit and looking much more intense suddenly. “Nothing here’s gonna happen without you choosing to let it.”

He waits an awkwardly long time before Clint realizes he wants a response.

“Oh,” Clint says. “Okay.” He doesn’t sound sure, though. There’s another silence and then Clint says, “So, Bucky says you helped him. After he lost his arm.”

Sam leans back and nods. “A little,” he says. “Losing pieces of yourself in the army, that’s something I know about. What you went through, though… I don’t know much about that. So if you want to tell me -- and only if you want to -- I’m willing to listen. If you don’t want to tell me, that’s cool too. We can talk about something else.”

“Something like what?”

Sam grins again. “Your choice.”

So it’s going to be like that. Clint stretches his feet out, getting more comfortable, tucking one arm behind his head. He lifts an eyebrow and says, “You wanna hear my thoughts on the Mets, Sam?”

Sam’s grin turns into a bit of a smirk and he says, “Kid, I wanna hear whatever you want to tell me.”

Clint, it turns out, can talk about the Mets for an exceedingly long time.

When he’s done, when his voice is rough around the edges and the angle of the sun coming through the window has changed, Sam gets up, ruffles his hair like Clint’s done something that pleases him, and asks what he wants for dinner.

More fucking choices.

Perhaps reading the exhausted distress on his face, Sam relents and says, “French toast again? Or maybe we should just order pizza?”

Options make it easier and Clint perks up. “Pizza,” he says, mouth already watering. He hasn’t had pizza in -- god, in more years than he can remember.

Pizza, it turns out, is just as delicious as he recalls.

*

It becomes a thing. Every day, Sam asks Clint what he wants.

Sometimes it’s in his office. Sometimes it’s casual, over a bowl of cereal or while Clint’s outside, carefully digging a new flower bed. And each time, Clint’s mind stumbles to a petrified halt and he wonders what Sam wants him to say, or what Bucky wants him to do, or what he’s supposed to do.

And then finally, as the evening sun starts to set over Sam’s beautiful backyard, pulling the shadows long, Natasha puts down the glass of wine she’s been sipping and says, “I found your brother.”

Clint looks up from his phone and the text Bucky had just sent. It’s badly spelled and barely makes sense and he suspects Steve has finally managed to drag Bucky out for a drink or two.

“Barney?” he says, but of course it’s Barney. He’s the only brother Clint’s got.

She swirls her wine glass and watches him over the rim. “He was picked up on outstanding warrants for theft and assault outside Tulsa a few weeks ago and is waiting for trial. No one posted his bail.”

Clint’s eyes go wide and his breathing hitches and he thinks, if he was a good brother, he’d be packing his things and picking pockets all the way to Tulsa to afford Barney’s bail. 

Instead, he just tightens his grip on his phone and says, “D’you think he did it?”

“Do you?”

Clint hesitates and then says, “Probably.”

She nods once and says, “I’ve got a number you can use if you want to reach him.”

And Clint does want to, is the thing. He wants to call Barney and ask him how he could have just let Clint go, could just leave him on the streets, could just… forget he had a brother at all. He wants to ask why he didn’t protect Clint from all the shit that happened -- from Loki and everything Clint did.

But Barney’s answer to protecting him from foster families who got a little rough was to run off and join the fucking circus. Clint can’t imagine what Barney would have done when faced with a crazy god intent on world domination.

Joined him, maybe.

“I -- maybe. I’ll call him,” he stammers, getting up. “But not today. I’m tired, I’m just. I’m gonna sleep. Okay?”

“Sure,” she says, nice and easy, and Clint flees to his bedroom, locking the door behind him.

His phone lights up with another blurry bar bathroom selfie.

*

He dreams he’s Loki’s puppet again, obedient to the core, killing with his bow and arrow and not caring whose blood he gets on his hands, but this time, he knows it’s a dream. He knows he doesn’t want to be there, he knows it’s not his choice.

It doesn’t matter. He rages and fights but still goes through the motions, killing and torturing and liking it.

His bow is dripping with blood and so are his hands and Loki is laughing and everything is bright blue and freezing cold.

He wakes up tangled in his sheets, and by the time he kicks his way free, he’s so fucking angry, he’s shaking. He storms out of his room and down the hall, into the backyard, which looks just as soft and peaceful in the middle of the night.

Clint doesn’t care. He’s shaking and crying with fury and he just needs to rip something apart, something that’s his, so he goes for the new flower bed with the violets he just planted and he tears at them with his hands until it’s all destroyed.

Destroying things is all Clint knows how to do, after all, and when all the plants are torn up, and he’s kneeling in the remains of the dirt and flowers, shoulders heaving as he cries, he thinks he should just leave -- abandon Sam and Natasha before he breaks anything else. Leave his phone behind, and Bucky behind. And Lucky too. He should go to Tulsa and break Barney out because that’s all he deserves.

Except not even Barney wants him.

Clint swears and cries harder.

He’s only a little startled when Natasha sits down nearby, crossing her legs and not even seeming to mind that she’s sitting in the broken remains of Clint’s stupid attempt to grow something.

“It’s hard,” she says, and he braces himself, waiting for another question about what he wants or another careful poke to see how he reacts. Instead, Natasha picks up a crushed violet and tries smoothing out its tangled stem with gentle fingers. “Feeling like your body isn’t even yours anymore.”

Clint swallows hard and doesn’t reply, just presses his face to his arms and closes his eyes and breathes.

“Everyone wants you to be okay, to make choices, to decide what you want to do next and you can’t even figure out how long it’s gonna be until someone else comes along and takes those choices from you again, so what’s the point in making them.”

She’s quiet for a moment, and all Clint can hear is his own heavy breathing.

“I can teach you to be in control of your body again. If you want me to.”

He turns his head to look at her and Natasha isn’t looking at him, almost like she thinks it doesn’t count as vulnerability if you don’t make eye contact.

“I’m not gonna sleep with you,” he tells her, because he can’t see what else she could be suggesting. It makes him feel nauseous even saying no -- who is he to say no? -- but he swallows down that fear and does his best to keep his voice from shaking.

It’s the first time he actually sees Natasha physically react to something. Her eyes widen and she stares at him for a moment and then she laughs, a startled, sincere sort of laugh that he instinctively knows not many people get to see.

“Jesus,” she says. “I’m not trying to seduce you, Barton, I’m trying to teach you self-defense.”

“Oh,” he says. And then, while she’s still chuckling, “Why?”

“So next time someone tries to make you do something you don’t wanna do, you can politely tell them to go fuck themselves.”

“But. Why do you care?”

She smiles, a wry, uncalculated twist of her lips, and says, “Because Bucky wants me to help you, and I owe him a debt or two. And because I know what it’s like to be turned into someone else’s weapon and how much better it is to be my own.”

“Okay,” Clint says, after only the briefest hesitation. He likes the idea of being able to defend himself, and thinks maybe it’s what Bucky wants for him.

He sits up, looking at the destruction he caused, and feels that same nauseous certainty that he’s done something that he’s going to be hurt for.

“Sam’s gonna be mad,” he says.

Natasha gets gracefully to her feet, holding out her hand to help him up. “Tell him the dog did it,” she says easily. “He’ll believe you.”

Clint’s eyes go wide and before he can even reply, she smirks and adds, “Or take a leap of faith and tell him the truth and trust that, since he forgave Lucky for it the other day, he’ll forgive you too. He’s a pretty forgiving guy.”

Forgiveness isn’t something Clint’s used to asking for, and it’s certainly not something he thinks he deserves.

“Trust me,” she says, still holding her hand out to him.

Trust is another one of those tricky things…

But Clint holds his breath and reaches for her hand and all she does is pull him to his feet and let’s go after he catches his balance.

Clint follows her into the house, still unnerved by it and wondering why he was so sure even that amount of physical contact was going to hurt.

*

“I’m going to have to touch you,” Natasha warns, “But I’ll stop whenever you want me to. Okay?”

Clint nods but he’s barely listening, too busy channelling his nervous energy into half-hearted stretches and bouncing on his toes.

“Clint,” she snaps, and his eyes zero in on her face. Once she has his full attention, she says again, “I’ll stop whenever you want me to.”

“Okay,” he says, swallowing hard.

It’s afternoon, bright and sunny. The backyard is all birdsong and sunshine again. Half the violets were salvaged and replanted, and Lucky is lounging in the shade, watching with lazy interest as Clint stretches.

“First I’m going to teach you how to fall,” she tells him, and Clint can’t help but snort. She lifts an eyebrow in question.

“Sorry. It’s just, I’m an expert faller. You kinda have to be, when you’re as clumsy as me and work at a circus.”

“You’ve had training.” She sounds at least a tiny bit impressed. “You didn’t say.”

Clint feels his cheeks heat up and he shrugs and tries to make himself smaller and says, “Not much? I mean. There was a bit of acrobatics in my act. People weren’t gonna be all that excited about an archery act unless I could do it upside down or blindfolded or backwards or while walking a tightrope, you know?”

“Show me.” 

She steps back, sweeping her arm out to offer him the flat, grassy area she’d decided to start his training in, and Clint steps into it, reluctant. 

“I haven’t done it, not in a while,” he says. She crosses her arms over her chest and waits.

“Okay,” Clint says, taking a deep breath. He tucks a hand up, behind his shoulder, stretching again, and then closes his eyes. “Okay,” he breathes again.

Muscle memory is an amazing thing. Even though his movements are stiffer than he’d like, and he knows he’ll be in pain later, it only takes a few easy flips and cartwheels for his body to remember the movements -- the stretches, the tucks and rolls, the contortions he had worked so hard on before.

A strange thing starts to happen as he warms up, as he starts to do more complicated patterns. It’s like he’s relearning his body from the inside out again. Sure, Loki took his mind, his free will. Made his body do things that Clint would never have done. But this -- this grace and strength and skill, this was all Clint’s. Something he learned, muscle memory he built. This was something Loki couldn’t touch.

Clint doesn’t know how long he tumbles for. It could be hours or just a few minutes. Time doesn’t matter anymore, all that matters is relearning his own limits, losing himself in the adrenaline of it. All that exists is Clint and his body and it’s the first time in years that his body has actually felt like his body.

When his arms give out and he falls, landing on the soft cushion of grass, Clint is bathed in sweat and panting. He’s also grinning -- it’s a crazy, crooked grin that hurts his cheeks, but it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except the burn in his muscles and his lungs.

He flops like a starfish, taking up as much space as he can and not even feeling like he should be making himself smaller.

Turning his head to look at Natasha, he says, “Kind of like that. But with arrows. And sometimes I’d stand on Barney’s shoulders, do flips and shit.” He blinks because she’s holding up her phone, smirking on the other side of it. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” she lies, her thumbs sweeping across the screen, tapping a few times, before she tosses the phone aside. A few seconds later, his own phone dings with an incoming text -- one and then two and three, four, five.

Before he can roll over to see what she’s done, she’s holding her hand out for him. “C’mon,” she says. “Up. We’re just getting started.”

“What?” he asks, incredulous. “But I’m sore -- I’m sweaty! I just--”

“Your falling technique sucks,” she says bluntly. “Up.”

He moans and staggers to his feet only to have her cheerfully take them from under him, sending him tumbling back to the ground.

*  
Bucky: Uhh what the fuck.

Bucky: Are you fucking kidding me.

Bucky: Seriously, Barton?

Steve: Heeeey, Clint. Can you maybe ask Nat not to send any more videos like that when we’re about to spar? Thor just about broke Bucky’s face.

Bucky: Steve’s a dirty liar. Send videos like that whenever you want. Seriously.

Clint stares at his phone and chews on his bottom lip and stares at his phone some more and still doesn’t know how to reply or interpret what Bucky’s problem is, or what Steve’s implying, and he feels a little stupid because he doesn’t get it.

He finally replies with a super cute picture of Lucky sleeping in a sunbeam by the window and tosses his phone aside.

*

“I’ve been thinking a little,” Clint says reluctantly, and Sam doesn’t even look fazed, despite the declaration coming mid-way through Clint’s discussion on the playoff chances of the Yankees.

“Have you? Don’t see where you’d have time with it, you and Nat spend so much time beating each other up out back,” he says, non-committal.

Clint brightens. He likes training with Natasha -- there’s a lot of touching, but all of it is perfunctory, purposeful. He knows where her hands will land and what they’re trying to do and there’s no room for second-guessing, for overthinking. There is just reacting -- and the more they train, the more confident he is in his reactions.

“There’s lots of time for thinking,” he tells Sam. “Meal times. When I do the dishes. When I’m in the shower. Before bed. Morning. While I nurse my various wounds.”

Sam snorts. “So what have you been thinking about?”

Clint slumps in his chair and says, “Maybe I should get a job. I mean, I can’t keep living here rent free and eating your food and taking your therapy and taking up your space.”

Sam considers for a moment and says, “Don’t worry about taking up space. You’re allowed to take up space. I invited you here fully knowing that I’d be giving you space -- that’s sort of the point. Giving you space. So, aside from that -- do you want a job?”

Clint thinks about it. “I want… to be able to take care of myself. And Lucky,” he says. 

Nodding, Sam says, “Makes sense. Natasha’s teaching you one aspect of being able to take care of yourself. I think it’s healthy to want to extend that independence to the rest of your life. So, what kind of job? What are your skills?”

“Uh. I’m great at picking pockets?” Clint offers hopefully.

Sam laughs. “Listen, kid, I’m all for a little resourcefulness when the situation calls for it, but Captain America’s not gonna handle it very well if his best friend is palling around with a pickpocket.”

Clint slumps even further. “I know. But I don’t really have any skills, other than archery and some tumbling. I don’t even have my high school diploma. I was working on it, but after Barney kicked me out, I couldn’t really --”

“High school diploma,” Sam says. “Pretty important step. Would make getting a job easier too. You want it?”

Clint thinks it through, because he owes Sam that much at least -- making sure the things he says he wants are actually things he wants. “Yeah,” he says finally. “I do.”

“Then let’s make it happen.”

*

“Hey.”

Bucky’s voice is soft around the edges, low and intimate, and Clint can hear voices and music in the background. He smiles, letting his notebook fall to the bed, and settles back against his pillows. 

“You out with Steve again?” he asks, because it’s late and Bucky’s clearly out somewhere.

“Mmhmm,” Bucky hums. “What about you?”

Clint’s pretty busy. Between training with Natasha, talking with Sam, studying for his GED, and taking care of as many chores as Sam’ll let him do, he hasn’t got much time for anything else.

He makes it a point to always have time to text Bucky or answer his calls, though.

“Studying,” Clint tells him, wrinkling his nose. “Not as fun.”

“That’s no fun at all,” Bucky says. There’s a muffled thump and then the background noise is quieter. “Y’should be here, with me.”

“Yeah?” Clint asks, smile growing. “Where are you?”

“I dunno. A bar. There’s music. Steve’s doing karaoke.” He snickers.

“Sounds fun.”

“If you were here, we’d be dancing.”

Clint blinks up at the ceiling, trying to picture that. It makes his skin itch in a way he’s not ready to think about too hard. “Never gone dancing,” he says, deflecting a little. “I’d be terrible.”

“I’d teach you,” Bucky says, voice slipping a little lower, warmer.

Clint rolls over onto his side, hugging a pillow, and then confessing, “I’m not so good with touching, though.”

“Hey, no,” Bucky says, turning serious. “Clint, no, no, you’re good. You’re so good. You’re the best.”

Laughing a little, Clint clutches his pillow even harder and says, “Okay, Bucky. I believe you.”

“Damn right.” Bucky’s quiet for a moment and then says, “Think I’m a little drunk, Barton.”

“Maybe a little,” he agrees.

“Wish you were here.”

“Me too.”

“One day, I’mma teach you to dance.”

“‘Kay. Go find Steve, okay?”

“Steve,” Bucky sighs. “So damned smug. So bad at karaoke.”

He hangs up without saying goodbye but Clint doesn’t mind, because he gets three sloppy bar bathroom selfies a moment later.

*

Sam doesn’t usually make a habit of sticking around when Natasha trains Clint. He uses the time to head out to the Veterans Affairs building, grocery shop, nap, go for a run, whatever it is he does when he’s not poking around in Clint’s head.

The fact that he’s sitting casually on the deck pretending to read a newspaper when Clint comes out on this particular afternoon doesn’t set off any alarm bells, however. 

Maybe it should have.

Natasha hands him a long, awkwardly shaped package wrapped in burlap and as soon as Clint takes it, he knows what it is and he drops it.

It’s a double recurve bow -- beautifully made. The sight of it makes Clint want to run away screaming and he itches to go wash his hands, like somehow the bow has gotten blood on them.

He’s been doing so much better with the obsessive handwashing thing.

Natasha doesn’t comment, just picks up the bow in a graceful movement and balances it in one hand.

“There are some videos of you,” she starts, and Clint cuts her off.

“Of what I did with Loki. I know. Jarvis showed them to me.

Her mouth tightens a little. “Of you before, in the circus. I’ve never seen anyone shoot like that.”

Clint steps away from the bow, arms wrapped around himself tightly. He doesn’t say anything, and behind him, Sam pointedly turns a page in the paper.

“No one does anything as well as you shoot unless they love it,” she says, conversational. “Why did you shoot?”

He thinks about it -- really thinks about it. He remembers Barney, remembers Swordsman and Trick Shot and how they trained him -- how much it hurt when he fucked up. But he also remembers how good he got -- how the world slowed down and gave him time to breathe when he pulled the drawstring back. 

He remembers the rush of knowing that he wasn’t going to miss. Of, for the first time in his fucking life, knowing that there was something he could do. Something he could do even better than Barney. Something no one could take from him. Something hundreds of people would cheer for, applaud for, giving in goddamned standing ovations for, every night.

He remembers what it was like to be that comfortably confident in his own skin, his own arms, his own muscles, his own ability to hit whatever it was he was aiming at.

He stares at the bow in Natasha’s hand and doesn’t move. Barely breathes. Remembers the nightmares of arrows dripping in blood.

“It’s just a tool, Clint,” she tells him. “It was your tool long before he tried to take it from you. And this is your chance to take it back.”

Clint lets out the breath he was holding and feels something in his chest crack, loosen.

He reaches out and takes the bow and it feels a little like coming home.

*

Clint gets a job. It’s just on weekends, barely cuts into his studying, and it’s for minimum wage, but the fact that he’s got a real, honest to god job that pays real money that didn’t come from someone else’s pocket is enough to make him shake.

Sam goes with him to open a bank account, because bank accounts are part of being real, honest to god adults.

Sometimes Clint can’t believe that this is his life.

He works at a combat archery place -- an old arena that’s been filled up with foam blocks made to look like walls, debris piles, and other obstacles for kids to play at being archers with NERF weapons. 

It’s amazing. Clint would have killed for a birthday party like this as a kid. Or at least picked a whole lot of pockets.

The place is filled with kids laughing, shouting at each other, war cries of all sorts, and it puts such a sweet spin on battles that it does a lot to soothe the damaged part of Clint that’s always half waiting for Loki to come back.

After hours, some of the staff like to hang out and challenge each other to battles in the arena, and Clint usually doesn’t stick around for those. There’s a lot of comradery and friendly shoves and high fives and that’s just too much casual touching for him.

Then one night, after they’ve sent the last kid home, his co-worker Kate looks at him assessingly and says, “Betcha I can hit more targets than you.”

Clint frowns at her, grabbing his stuff from his locker. “There aren’t any targets,” he says.

She rolls her eyes. “We’ll set some up. C’mon. They hired you because you’re apparently some archery wizard from a carnival or something.”

“Circus,” he says.

“Prove it.” She grins at him and the others aren’t here, it’s not as loud, as boisterous as it usually is, and Kate’s smart. He knows she’s been watching him, has seen how carefully he shies away from physical touch. He trusts her. And he kinda likes her. She makes him laugh.

“Okay,” he says.

They set up targets and she nearly, nearly beats him. As they leave a few hours later, locking up behind themselves, she promises she’ll beat him next time, and Clint happily thinks that he’s willing to let her try.

*

Clint passes his GED exams in March, and he thinks Sam might be more excited than he is.

“This is huge,” he says, beaming at Clint like he’s proud of him. Clint doesn’t know what to do with that, doesn’t think anybody’s ever been proud of him. “We’ve gotta celebrate.”

Clint can’t help but feeling pleased and proud of himself, which is another emotion he doesn’t quite know what to do with.

They go out to a pub that Sam’s been known to frequent with some of his buddies from the VA centre. It’s cozy, filled with giant screens playing hockey games, with lots of beer on tap and not all that much noise. It’s perfect for Clint, who still gets nervous in crowded places, where the exits might be blocked by all the people.

Better yet, they sell chicken wings by the pound, and he, Sam, and Natasha order a giant platter.

They’re midway through the platter when Bucky texts.

_Whatcha doing?_

Clint takes a picture of the wings, Sam giving a cheesy thumbs up in the background, and sends it, with _Celebrating my GED!!_

_Would love to see YOU celebrating your GED,_ Bucky replies.

Clint’s not all that great at selfies. They make him feel self-conscious and insecure. Bucky sends him tonnes, though, so it’s only fair that he try, especially when Bucky specifically asks for one. So he flips the camera so it’s front-facing, makes a face, snaps it, and sends it before he can get too critical.

Natasha had been at the bar getting another beer and she slides into her chair again, taking a sip and saying, “That Bucky?”

“Yeah,” Clint says, distracted as his phone lights up with a reply. It says, _Looks good. Would look even better in person_. 

“Thought he’d be here by now,” she says, but Clint’s not listening.

He feels his cheeks flush and can’t think of a reply for Bucky’s text, but he doesn’t have time to anyway, because the pub door opens and Bucky’s there suddenly, stepping into the dim room, laughing at something Steve’s saying as he follows behind.

Clint just freezes in his chair, eyes wide, staring at Bucky as he and Steve make their way over. Sam is grinning smugly, and Natasha is just sipping her beer and watching, but Clint can feel how smug she is too. Bucky, though, Bucky looks a little nervous now.

“Hi,” he says, when he’s finally close enough, stopping by their table. “Can we, uh, join you guys?”

Clint hops out of his chair, sending it sliding back, and says, “Bucky, what are you -- how are you -- hi!”

Some of Bucky’s nervousness eases a bit, his smile softening. “Hey,” he says, studying Clint’s face like he’s memorizing each tiny detail. “You look good. Uhm. Better.”

Clint looks helplessly from Bucky to Sam to Natasha and back again because he doesn’t know what to do here -- he wants to bounce off the walls in excitement but he’s pretty sure that’s inappropriate. Is a hug appropriate? How do you greet the guy who lives in your head, who you text 24/7, who you haven’t seen in months, who has somehow appeared randomly at your GED celebration party?

Clint’s been working a whole bunch on making choices, on trusting himself, and it does take a big leap of faith for him to just set all that anxiety aside and just react the way he would if he wasn’t second guessing himself.

But he does it. 

It’s been a good day -- he got his GED, he’s celebrating, and somehow, Bucky is here.

“I’m so happy you’re here!” he says, probably too loudly, but whatever. He throws himself at Bucky, slamming him into a hug, and it doesn’t even occur to him that it’s the only physical contact he can remember initiating since he was a child.

And by the time he thinks of that, it’s too late, he’s already clinging to Bucky, and he tenses up, about to pull back. Bucky just laughs and catches him though, hugging him back just as hard, even if the force of Clint’s tackle hug sends him stumbling back into Steve.

Clint eventually pulls away, back into his own carefully constructed personal space. “I didn’t know you were coming,” he says brightly. “I thought Sam wouldn’t let you come until I was better at not, you know. Following you around like an imprinted duckling. I think that’s what he said. Isn’t that what you said, Sam?”

Before Sam can reply, Steve swings an arm around Bucky’s shoulders and says smugly, “Bucky uses his birthday to get all sorts of things. Like a quinjet.”

“I didn’t get a quinjet,” Bucky argues, cheeks flushing a bit. “I borrowed a quinjet. Shut up.”

Clint’s eyes go even wider. “It’s your birthday? And you came to see me?”

Shrugging Steve off, Bucky rubs at the back of his neck and says, “Well, yeah. What else would I want for my birthday?”

Clint can think of so many things but he doesn’t say any of them, just beams at Bucky even though it’s making his cheeks hurt.

Natasha kicks out a chair towards them and says, “Jesus. Just sit down already.”

They do -- Steve teasing Bucky, Bucky rolling his eyes, Sam saying something about all the progress Clint’s made and how important it is to celebrate his GED and how it’s okay for Bucky to be there to celebrate with him. Clint doesn’t care about any of it. He’s too busy staring at Bucky and basking in the echoes of happy excitement he can feel from Bucky, in his own chest.

“This is the best day,” he says finally, interrupting whatever Sam and Steve are talking about. He stopped listening.

Bucky turns and grins at him. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. How long can you stay?”

Bucky shoots Sam a quick look and says, “A few days.”

Clint’s smile grows impossibly wider.

*

They play darts, and every time Clint knocks Bucky’s dart off the bullseye, mostly without even bothering to look, Bucky’s eyes get wider. Clint’s a little smug about it.

“Lucky’s gonna be so excited to see you,” Clint says as he fetches the darts from the board to start another round. “Are you coming to the house? Are you staying at Sam’s?”

Bucky lines up his first shot and says, “He says he’s all out of guest rooms, so Steve and I have been arguing over who gets the couch.”

Clint brightens even more. “You can come to work with me tomorrow,” he says. “Kate’ll want to meet you.”

The trajectory of the dart is off just a bit, just enough to cause the tip to hit the inner ring and the dart falls to the floor.

Clint stares at it, startled, because Bucky is good. Bucky is nearly as good as he is. None of the other darts have hit the floor until Clint’s knocked them off the board.

“Will she?” Bucky asks, all smooth and casual like nothing happened. He takes his next shot and it lands right in the centre.

“Probably,” Clint says, still distracted. He watches Bucky, trying to figure out if he said something wrong, but Bucky looks just the same as before, if somewhat more focused on the game. “She’s very competitive.”

Bucky grimaces, just the tiniest amount, and makes the next shot.

It’s Bucky’s idea that they join the others at the pool table. Clint’s having a fantastic time with just Bucky, but maybe Bucky’s not having as much fun? It’s hard to tell. Maybe he doesn’t like losing. If that’s the case, he’s got another thing coming when they hit the pool table, because Clint’s probably even better at pool than he is at darts.

They team up, Sam backing away with a laugh when they ask him if he wants to play.

“I’ve seen all of you play,” he says. “I’m not getting in the middle of this. I’m happy being the referee.”

It’s Bucky and Steve against Clint and Natasha, and Clint gets to break. After he sinks one and the balls come to a stop, he takes an extra long time chalking his cue, staring at the table and trying to figure out how to play this. He knows how he wants to play it -- curve shot off the back rail, with a double off the six, should be able to sink three with that.

He sneaks a look at Bucky, who is having some hissed sort of argument with Steve on the other side of the table, and then back at the balls. If Bucky is mad that Clint beat him a few times at darts, maybe Clint ought to do something simpler, or even scratch.

He takes a deep breath and lines up his shot and breathes again and it’s kind of like shooting, really. He can see the angles spread out before him -- he can clear the table if he wants. 

But it’s his first shot. Bucky hasn’t even had a chance yet.

That’s not really fair, is it.

So he breathes again and takes the shot and, just before he makes contact with the cue ball, he turns the cue, just a little. Just enough to send the cue ball rolling a little to the left and bouncing harmlessly off the rail.

“Shit,” he says. Natasha rolls her eyes at him.

It’s Bucky’s turn and he takes his side of the table with a crooked grin. “Knew you couldn’t be good at everything,” he says, before lining up his shot and clearing the table.

Natasha nudges him with her hip as she slides by to collect the ball. “Idiot,” she says, but she sounds fond. Louder, she says, “Bucky, switch me teammates.”

“Hey,” Clint says, laughing. “Rude. You can’t ditch me because I lost one round!”

“Yeah?” she asks, raising an eyebrow in challenge. “Maybe this time you’ll actually try.”

“Bad breaks happen to everyone,” Bucky tells him bracingly. “You’ll do great this time.”

Clint rolls his eyes but he’s smiling.

He’s still smiling after he sinks every ball in one shot.

*

It’s Bucky’s birthday so he gets the couch, and Steve only grumbles a little bit as he makes a bed for himself on the living room floor.

“I’m an Avenger,” he says, morosely tossing a pillow onto his pile of blankets. “I deserve better than this.”

“Shoulda thought of that before you got all jacked up on that super serum, pal,” Bucky says as he smugly drops his own pile of sheets on the couch. It only takes Lucky about ten seconds to throw himself up onto the couch and dig around in the pile, rolling and making a nest for himself.

“I wish I’d known it was your birthday.” Clint’s watching from the doorway, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest. “I’d have gotten you something.”

“Aww, sweetheart,” Bucky says. “You didn’t hafta.”

“Seriously,” Steve laughs from the floor. “Seeing you is all he wanted. Shoulda heard him all week, ever since Sam said it would be okay if we came for a visit. Spent the whole time talking about how much he missed your face.”

“Shut up,” Bucky snaps, but Steve just keeps grinning and talking.

“I didn’t think he’d be able to keep it a damned secret. Never seen him so excited for something, it was adorable.”

“Steve,” Bucky hisses, and Steve opens his mouth like he’s going to say something else, so Bucky just tackles him.

They wrestle on the floor but Steve’s laughing too hard to really manage much of a resistance -- plus, Bucky’s got a metal arm, which Clint figures has to give him an advantage. Lucky barks and happily joins in, though his main goal seems to be trying to lick Bucky’s face, and it’s chaos, with loads of laughter and cursing.

Clint can’t help feeling a little left out, a little wistful at how easy Bucky and Steve are with each other and physical contact. They’re both pretty careful around Clint -- everyone’s careful around Clint, except Natasha when she’s training him.

Clint finds himself wondering absently if he can somehow convince Bucky to join them in a training session, and then his cheeks flush as he tries to figure out why he wants to get his hands on Bucky so badly.

Natasha slides up to him as he turns away, ready to flee to his bedroom and compartmentalize all the feelings he’s not ready to think about. She slips an arm around his shoulders, squeezes, and says, “It’s okay, lastachka.”

“What is?” he asks, leaning a little into her embrace.

He can hear the smile in her voice even though he can’t see it. “Wanting to touch.”

Clint inches an arm around her waist, a careful, measured touch that he’s never felt comfortable reaching for before, even as he says, “No idea what you’re talking about.”

*

Clint is in charge of a nine-year-old’s birthday party the next morning at work, which is amazing. He loves the kids and how uncomplicated they are -- all they want is fucking Minecraft shit on the wall and then to shoot foam arrows at their buddies.

He brings Bucky along, leaving him at the back of the room while he shows the kids how to work the bow and arrows and yeah, maybe he shows off a bit, but what kid doesn’t want to see a grown man shoot a bow and arrow blindfolded and backwards and hit a target?

It’s just a bonus that it makes Bucky mumble a few curse words from the back of the room.

After he hustles the kids off into the arena for their first round, Clint grabs a piece of leftover birthday cake and relights a candle, bringing it to Bucky with a bright smile.

“Happy birthday,” he says, and Bucky rolls his eyes but he’s grinning as he blows out the candle.

After the birthday party packs up, Bucky even helps Clint clean up, yanking down crepe paper streamers and popping balloons with a little too much glee. They’re just cramming the last of the banners in the garbage when the door opens, the little bell jingling, and Kate arrives for her afternoon shift.

“Kate!” Clint bounces out from behind the counter, beaming at her. “Guess what!”

She rolls her eyes, sips her coffee, and says, “Too early, Barton.”

Normally, Clint would agree. He’s not a morning person. It’s coming up on one o’clock, but morning is relative when you’re starting a later shift.

“Bucky came to visit.”

She instantly looks more awake, eyes brightening. “Ooh,” she says, and then she catches sight of Bucky, lurking behind the counter with his arms crossed over his chest and a faint scowl. She looks from him to Clint and back again and her eyes get bigger.

“The fuck,” she says, grabbing Clint by the arm.

He’s gotten used to being manhandled by her, so he doesn’t flinch away, letting her tug him out of the building and out onto the sidewalk, like Bucky can’t see them through the massive windows.

“What the fuck!” she says, arms swinging wildly. She points to the window, and, he assumes, to Bucky, and says, “Explain!”

Clint can’t help laughing a little, feeling helpless. “I think I already did? It’s Bucky. From New York. I told you about Bucky.”

She rolls her eyes. “Of course you told me about Bucky, the random guy you text 24/7, who is a paragon of perfection and super smart and super funny. What I want to know is why you never mentioned that Bucky is, first of all, super hot, and second of all, a motherfucking Avenger.”

Clint glances back into the window at Bucky, whose scowl has gotten a lot more pronounced. He looks a few seconds away from losing his patience and storming out here to see what the fuck is going on, and Clint’s got no explanation for the way his stomach goes all fluttery at the thought of that.

“Oh,” he says, looking back at Kate. “Well. Right. Bucky. The Avenger. I thought I mentioned that.”

“Nope.” She scowls. “How’m I supposed to handle this? What am I supposed to say to him? Oh god, do you think he could get me Iron Man’s autograph? Iron Man is amazing. Or, oh god, what if he can get me Captain America’s autograph, that would be so cool.”

“Well,” Clint says, slow. “I could probably get Captain America’s autograph for you? I mean. He’s sleeping on my living room floor, so.”

Her eyes look like they’re going to pop right out of her head, but before she can do much more than stammer wordlessly, Bucky opens the door and says stiffly, “You okay?”

Clint flashes a blinding grin at him. “Oh, yes,” he says quickly, trying to smooth over the awkwardness of Kate apparently being Tony’s biggest fan, and also, the Avengers apparently being something people are fans of. He’s never really thought about it before.

Bucky doesn’t look convinced. He’s glaring at Kate now, so Clint says, “Right, okay, Bucky, this is Kate. Kate,” he says, putting particular emphasis on her name in hopes of snapping her out of her meltdown. “Who is just an ordinary person. Who’s going to be totally normal. Right?”

Kate looks from Bucky to Clint and back again before snapping her mouth shut, swallowing hard, and clearly rallying. She sticks out a hand for a shake, but it’s the hand not holding her coffee -- her left. She holds it out awkwardly for half a second before realizing it means Bucky’s going to have to take it with his left -- which is metal -- and then she yelps, drops her coffee, splatters it everywhere, swears, and snatches his right hand with her right hand, kicking the empty cup away smoothly.

It’s… not very graceful and Clint resists the urge to hide his face behind his hands because Kate is a mess and now Clint is going to have to try to convince Bucky that she’s usually much cooler than this so he thinks Clint’s actually made some cool friends.

Or at least, one cool friend.

But Bucky just shakes her hand, picks up the empty cup, tosses it into a nearby garbage with perfect aim, and says, “I’m gonna let you finish up. See you at home, Barton. Have fun.”

And then he walks away.

And Clint stares after him in shock until Kate kicks his shoe and says, “So, about that autograph.”

*

When he gets home from work, Clint finds Bucky sprawled in the backyard in a sun spot, Lucky napping with his head on his chest. No one else is home.

“Sam dragged them to the VA,” Bucky says, when Clint comments on it, coming to sit in the grass near Bucky, but not too close, because he knows why he got sent away from the tower, and he’s working on not being clingy.

“Oh,” he says. He’s not all that used to being by himself, probably because Sam or Natasha both think he needs constant supervision. He hasn’t had an accidental disassociation in weeks.

Bucky grimaces, throwing an arm over his eyes to block the sun. “Also,” he says, clearly reluctant. “I wanted to talk to you. About Kate.”

“Oh,” Clint says again. “Do you not -- she’s much cooler than she seemed, I swear. I guess she’s a big Avengers fan? I didn’t realize that was a thing.”

Bucky lets his arm flop to the grass above his head and smiles ruefully up at Clint. “I know you didn’t,” he says. “It’s one of my favourite things about you. But yeah, she’s… she’s fine. She’s good. Nice. Cute, I guess.”

Clint’s eyebrows shoot up to his hairline and his mouth falls open and it’s not his most attractive look. “Oh,” he says. “Do you… want her number, or… I mean, she’d probably die if you…”

Closing his eyes and taking a deep breath, Bucky says, “See, no, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that she’s great, Clint. And if you guys are -- if you want to -- or you already are -- or you want to try it out or whatever -- then I think that’s… it’s great. Okay?”

Clint is absentmindedly tearing up handfuls of grass, piling them in front of his crossed legs, and he still has no idea what Bucky’s trying to say. He’s quiet for so long, Bucky finally opens one eye to squint at him.

“You okay?” he asks.

Clint decides to go with honesty. It’s something he’s been working with Sam on. 

“Confused,” he says. “I don’t know what you mean.”

Bucky sits up, scratching Lucky’s head as the dog huffs and adjusts his position. “I mean, if you wanna date her, then… then that’s good. That’s great. She seems great.”

“Uhm. Okay.” Clint smiles but it’s a weak effort and Bucky can probably tell. 

“Listen,” he says, changing the subject. Clint is glad about that until he realizes the new topic is even worse. “There was something else I wanted to talk about, another reason I needed to come out here. I’m being sent away on a mission and I won’t be able to take my phone with me. It’s an infiltration thing, shouldn’t be longer than a week or two, but I didn’t want you thinking I just didn’t want to talk.”

Bucky has been sent away on a few missions but nothing for longer than a day or two and he’s never been out of contact while away. “Is it safe?” Clint asks. “How will I know if something happens?”

“You’ll feel it,” Bucky says. “Won’t you?”

The thing about feeling echoes of Bucky’s feelings in his chest is that, sure, it’s cool and magical and all that, but generally speaking, turns out a cell phone was a lot more reliable. 

“Besides,” Bucky adds. “I’ll be checking in with Steve.”

“He won’t be with you? But who’ll watch your back!”

“I watch Steve’s back,” Bucky says with a grin. “I’ll be alright. I got this. You trust me?”

Of course Clint does, but that doesn’t mean he’s not gonna worry. 

Bucky gets to his feet with an easy smile and says, “C’mon, enough of this, we’ve only got a little while left before I’ve got to go. I want to see you shoot.”

Now that he’s paying attention to Bucky’s emotional echo, Clint can feel a soft, lingering sense of distress and sadness, but he doesn’t know what to do about it, so he gets his bow and sets up some targets and lets himself be distracted. 

*

Bucky can’t sleep and he’s sad and Clint can feel it. It’s like an echo chamber, his emotions and Bucky’s emotions chasing each other around in Clint’s chest until he doesn’t know where his sadness ends and Bucky’s begins. 

It’s nearing midnight and Clint is staring at the shadows on his ceiling. Bucky and Steve are leaving in the morning and part of Clint wants to go downstairs, ask Bucky what he did to make him sad. He doesn’t, though, and eventually, he falls asleep. 

The nightmare is almost instant. He’s frozen from the inside out and the world is raining blood, only this time, the bodies he’s stepping over all have the faces of his friends. 

“You have heart,” Loki says. “And I’ll carve it from you.”

Only it’s not Loki who comes at him with the knife to carve out his heart, it’s Bucky, and Clint starts screaming. 

He wakes up and for a wild moment, thinks he’s still dreaming for because Bucky is looming over him.

He’s not holding a knife, though, he’s holding Clint’s hand, his other hand smoothing Clint’s hair back as he whispers, “It’s alright, I got you.”

Clint sucks in a trembling breath and clutches Bucky’s hand. “Was I screaming?” He asks, voice breaking. 

“Not out loud,” Bucky says. “I didn’t realize you still had bad nightmares like that.”

“Haven’t for a while,” Clint confesses. “Today just… unsettled me.”

“Why?”

Honesty, Clint remembers. Sam keeps talking about honesty. 

“You’re sad,” he whispers. “And I don’t know what I did.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” Bucky said, ducking his head to rest his forehead against their joined hands. “You didn’t do anything. You aren’t responsible for my feelings. Okay? I’m sorry.”

Clint tightens his hold on Bucky’s hand and says, “I just want to make you happy and don’t know how.”

“I’m just gonna miss you,” Bucky tells him, smoothing his hair back again. “That’s all.”

“Would you stay here with me til morning, and tell me a story to help me sleep?”

Bucky does hesitate and then he smiles, a little rueful. “Sam’ll kill me. Move over.”

Clint scoots over and lays there, tense and nervous, until Bucky’s on the bed with him, on top of the covers instead of underneath. He doesn’t complain when Clint warily slides up right beside him. 

He just smoothed Clint ‘s hair back, tells him to close his eyes, and begins to tell him the story of the time when his sister Becca decided she had a crush on Steve, and how awkward it was for everybody. 

Clint falls asleep smiling. 

*

It’s hazy, just before dawn, when Clint wakes up, which he’s grateful for. Usually, it’s not a good day unless he can sleep in until at least 11, but Bucky has to leave today and Clint wants to spend as much time with him as he can.

Bucky’s still sleeping and Clint doesn’t want to be a total creep and watch him sleep as the sun comes up -- despite how much he very much wants to do just that -- so he grabs his phone instead and texts Kate.

_Bucky says you and me should date_ , he says, after chewing on his bottom lip for a moment. _Thoughts?_

It takes her about forty seconds to reply. _Eew gross what the fuck_ , she writes, and then _also it’s like the middle of the night what the fuck barton. Pls tell me u did not wake me up to discuss ur gross feelings for me._

He smiles a little, snuggling down into his blanket a bit more, before answering, _you don’t wanna get all up on this?_

_NOPE._

He doesn’t reply for a moment or two, and she writes back, _pls tell me i didn’t break ur heart. Plus I thought you wanted Barnes. U know. Ur super hot Avenger buddy u forgot to tell me about._

_Heart’s ok. But Bucky’s sad and I don’t know why. And. I don’t wanna date you. Sry._

_Damn. Whatever shall I do. U don’t have gross feelings for me. The world is ending._ A moment later, she adds, _Also Bucky’s sad because he wants you._

Clint stares at her text for a while and then responds with _???_ because she’s not making sense.

_Omfg,_ she writes. _Boys r so dumb. He’s jealous. He wants u. He thinks u want me. (Gross.) (No offense)._

_How do you know???_

_ASK HIM. GOODNIGHT._

He tries to get her to clarify but despite all the pleading gifs he sends, she doesn’t reply, and he eventually gives up with a soft groan and sets his phone aside and gives in to what he wanted to do in the first place.

Bucky looks beautiful in the rising sunlight, even as it hits his eyes and makes him scowl in his sleep. He’s snoring a little, there’s a tiny bit of drool, and his hair is sporting an impressive amount of bedhead.

Clint wants to climb on top of him and nuzzle him all over and cling like a monkey and never let him go.

He swallows hard and remembers what Natasha said -- it’s okay to want to touch.

And maybe… maybe Bucky wants to touch too.

Despite the careful layer of blankets he’d made sure to leave between them.

The light eventually grows too bright and Bucky stirs, turning away from it with a grimace and burying his face in his pillow with a faint whine that makes Clint want to squish his cheeks.

He waits until Bucky turns his head enough to glare out from his curtain of ratty hair before he smiles a little and says, “Hey, good morning, hi.”

Bucky just blinks at him and then buries his face again. “Too early,” he mumbles.

It is early. But Clint’s got nervous adrenaline running through his system and feels like he’s never been so awake.

“I’ll get you coffee!” he says, throwing himself out of bed and dashing out of the room.

He waits impatiently for the coffee to brew, dancing on his toes while he watches it drip, and then fills two mugs, fixes Bucky’s just how he likes it, and carefully carries both mugs back upstairs and into his bedroom. He kicks the door shut behind him.

Bucky’s sitting up now, scowling blearily and clutching a pillow to his chest which he doesn’t let go of, even after gratefully taking the mug from Clint.

Clint clambors onto the bed, kneeling beside his hip, facing him, and watches him take a cautious sip. Bucky watches him carefully over the rim of his mug.

Bucky licks his lips and shakes his hair out of his eyes and he looks a little more awake now. “You okay?” he asks.

Clint’s nervously tapping out a meaningless rhythm on the blankets piled up at Bucky’s hip, trying to think of the words he needs to explain the things happening in his head -- and maybe his heart. He can feel Bucky’s sleepy sense of wariness and concern, and he doesn’t want to cause Bucky anxiety here, but he also doesn’t know how to say he doesn’t want to date Kate because he’s only ever wanted to do more-than-friends-typed-things with Bucky.

Like kissing.

And Natasha told him that it’s okay to want to touch.

“Sam says I’m supposed to make my own decisions,” he says finally, because it’s as good a place as any to start.

“Yeah,” Bucky agrees. He takes another bracing sip of coffee. “What are you making your mind up about?”

Clint takes a deep breath. “You,” he says. But maybe words aren’t the way to go here -- maybe the only way Bucky’s going to trust that Clint actually knows what he wants is if Clint shows him.

So he gathers up whatever remains of his courage and, before he can fall back into an anxious mess of indecision and anxiety, he leans closer, one hand landing on Bucky’s thigh for balance.

And he kisses the taste of coffee right off Bucky’s lips.

For a moment, it’s the best thing he’s ever imagined. He’s kissing Bucky and his eyes are closed and he can taste coffee and morning and Bucky and none of his anxiety matters -- it’s gone because he knows more than he’s ever known anything before that this is right and good and perfect and he’s allowed to want this.

But Bucky doesn’t move -- he’s tense, frozen, definitely not kissing Clint back. He’s not even breathing.

And that’s when the anxiety comes back, an aching, tight and twisting feeling low in his gut. 

Clint pulls back just enough to whisper, “Bucky?”

His voice breaks in the middle and Bucky’s hand -- the metal one -- tightens around his mug of coffee and it crumbles. Scalding hot liquid spills over them both, and Clint doesn’t have a convenient pillow to protect him from the pain. He scrambles back and he’ll never forget the horrified, haunted look on Bucky’s face as he does.

He tumbles off the bed and leaps to his feet, shaking his burned arm and pretending the pain he’s feeling is just from that, and not an embarrassed sort of rejection that he was not expecting to feel.

But that’s the thing about choices -- he gets to make his own, and so does Bucky, and apparently, Clint’s read Bucky all wrong and Bucky had never wanted this. Never wanted Clint.

And why would he?

Why would anybody.

“Clint, wait, hold on, just a minute,” Bucky says, still looking sick to his stomach. He’s trying to untangle himself from the wet blanket, the broken mug, the pillow, but Clint just shakes his head wildly and backs towards the door.

“Sorry,” he says. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to -- I didn’t want to -- I didn’t -- just. I have to go, I have to -- I’m real sorry.”

“Clint,” Bucky snaps, frustrated, and Clint backs right into the door with a thump, scrambling for the knob before Bucky manages to free himself.

“You’re hurt,” Bucky says. “Let me --”

“Sorry,” Clint says again, hoarse, and then the door is open and Steve’s standing there, frowning and looking sleepy.

“Bucky in there?” he asks. “We gotta get a move on.”

“Sorry,” Clint mumbles, dashing for the bathroom. 

He closes the door and locks it and turns the cold water on, holding his scalded arm under it and hoping the sound of it masks his crying.

He doesn’t leave the bathroom, not even when Steve knocks and says, “We gotta go, Clint. You coming to say goodbye?”

He waits until the house is silent and still.

*

“Did Bucky do something?” Sam asks, and Clint can’t look at him, but he still shakes his head, staring down at his hands. He’s been biting his fingernails and they’re a ragged mess.

“Are you sure?” Sam pushes. “Because he wasn’t on the couch, Clint. And then you were upset. And you wouldn’t even see them off. So I’m kinda feeling like something happened. And if he did something, then--”

“He didn’t,” Clint mumbles. “Okay? It’s fine.”

“Then what happened?”

“I fucked up. I made a choice, and it was the wrong one, and he didn’t want it, and I’m sorry.”

There’s silence for a moment, and then Sam says, “He didn’t want it? That doesn’t sound like Bucky.”

Clint shoots him a quick glare and then ducks his head again. “Made it pretty clear. I shouldn’t have -- of course he didn’t want it. Want me. Just because -- it’s like you told me before, just because we have this bond, that doesn’t mean I owe him anything or he owes me anything. We still have free will, and he made his choice and he. Wants me to date Kate. Who thinks I’m gross. I mean, platonically, she thinks I’m okay. But.”

When he darts another quick look at Sam, Sam looks pretty confused, but he rallies and says, “Do you want to date Kate?”

“I don’t want to date anybody,” Clint says, and it’s not quite a lie. He kinda felt like what he and Bucky had was deeper than dating. Somehow. 

But he was wrong.

“Okay,” Sam says. “Then what do you want?”

“Sleep,” Clint mumbles.

Sam’s all about Clint making his own decisions, so he lets him call in sick to work and sleep for the rest of the day.

When he wakes up, there’s a text on his phone from Bucky that says we’ll talk when I get back.

He doesn’t reply.

*

It’s not like he suddenly loses all connection with Bucky. He can still feel him rattling around in his chest, a mess of tension and focus that doesn’t leave much room for anything else. It’s relatively similar to how Bucky always feels on a mission, except this is long term and Clint knows Steve’s not there to watch his back, and Clint doesn’t get a reassuring text saying everything’s fine at the end of the day.

Well, not from Bucky. Steve keeps him up-to-date as best he can after every one of Bucky’s daily check ins, but it’s really not the same.

Clint tells himself it’s better this way.

He needs time, needs to get over Bucky and move on. Maybe now that he’s so much stronger than he was before, maybe he and Bucky don’t need this bond anymore. Maybe without constant contact, it’ll fade. Maybe Clint can move on with his life and let Bucky move on with his.

He does his best, taking more shifts at the range and training with Natasha whenever she’s not away on a mission of her own, which seems to be happening more and more lately. 

And then, in the middle of the night, he keeps finding himself descending down an Avengers-inspired research spiral that starts somewhere with academic articles on the founding of the Avengers and why they matter and ends somewhere on HulkWannaSmash’s Tumblr account dedicated to posting pictures of Bucky’s thighs.

He’s lost control of his life somewhere and he’s too embarrassed to ask Sam for help on getting it back.

So instead, he scrolls through pages and pages of pictures of Bucky’s thighs straining as he fights off aliens invading New York, strutting down red carpets at events, standing behind Steve at press conferences. He wonders if Bucky ever skips leg day at the gym and then groans and hides under his blankets and wonders who the fuck starts a tumblr dedicated to a man’s thighs, as distracting as those thighs are.

He also begins to piece together just how much celebrity status goes along with being an Avenger, even one of the ones more content to lurk in the background of Tony Stark’s media frenzy. He begins to see exactly how insignificant Clint is in the larger scheme of Bucky’s life, where gossip sites have pictures of him escorting beautiful actresses to movie premieres, dancing with gorgeous socialites at charity functions.

Why the fuck would someone like that want a kiss from someone like Clint? Honestly, Clint’s just lucky Bucky stuck around long enough to make sure Clint recovered from Loki’s mind fuckery. He should be satisfied with even that much of Bucky’s time.

“Please tell me,” Kate says, when Clint finally shows up for work again, “That you didn’t leave me here dealing with this shit show so you could have lots of kinky sex with your new Avengers boyfriend. Or, if you did do so, I expect details.”

Clint slumps behind the counter, collapses on the stool there, and says, “So, funny thing, I think he really just… wanted me to date you.”

She stares at him for a moment and then says, “He’s an Avenger. He can’t be that dumb.”

“I mean, I can’t blame him too much,” Clint says, lips twisting. “I mean. I’d definitely be getting the better end of that deal.”

She scowls but doesn’t say anything, just shoves at his shoulder and lets a soft sort of companionable silence fall. It’s not till a few hours later that she says, “So, I know this probably isn’t your thing, because you don’t seem to like people, but some of the other guys here are having a party and I think you should come with me -- no, hear me out -- because the best way to get over a guy being an idiot is to find another guy to be an idiot with.”

Clint looks at her and slurps at the coffee she brought him and considers. He’s been thinking about Bucky’s emotions and how they burrow their way into his chest and he knows being upset because Bucky doesn’t want the same thing Clint wants isn’t really fair. And he’s also been thinking, for the first time, about what it must be like for Bucky, trying to infiltrate some evil doer’s lair on a top secret mission, only to have Clint’s emo mopey feelings getting all over him.

So maybe he should go to this party. Not to hook up with someone, he’s not really into that, but to be a nice, normal guy with a normal life, to show Bucky he’s totally well-adjusted and okay and Bucky doesn’t have to stick around to keep him sane or whatever.

Sure, there’s still nightmares sometimes, and sometimes, when he gets scared or really upset, his eyes flash blue and he blacks out a little bit, but that’s very rare these days. 

Bucky deserves to be free to move on and Clint’s pretty sure it’s his own patheticness that keeps Bucky held captive to this stupid bond.

And Sam would probably be over the moon if Clint did something normal.

“Okay,” he says, and Kate beams at him.

“It’s gonna be great,” she says. He’s not too sure about that, but he’s willing to try.

*

It’s not that Clint’s never been to a party.

It’s just that he’s never been to a party that didn’t involve a few sword swallowers, some acrobats, and a clown playing beer pong.

This party is remarkably tame. A bunch of frat boys are gathered around a keg, some sorority girls are turning the living room into a makeshift dance floor, someone has ambitiously put out two bowls of chips that are already nearly gone. There’s generic hip hop music and an abundance of red solo cups.

It’s pretty much the most cliche party. The only thing that makes it different from what Clint always assumed parties like this were like is that someone grabbed a handful of Nerf bows from work and every now and again, they run through the party shrieking and shooting each other. Clint would kinda love to get his hands on one of those bows and show them how it’s done, but Kate’s got a pretty firm grip on his arm and is intent on introducing him to every guy in the place who, he assumes, has ever shown even the slightest interest in another guy.

He’s sipping a beer and keeps checking his phone out of habit, but of course Bucky’s not going to text.

He gets a text from Steve at 9 p.m., right on schedule, saying check in’s good, he’s fine. You okay?

He answers with a yes and shoves his phone in his pocket and doesn’t fight when Kate suggests that he dance.

He’s just as bad a dancer as he told Bucky he was, and he’s also a few feet away from the actual spot where everyone else is dancing, because personal space is still a goddamned thing. He dances until he gets dizzy, and when someone starts pouring shots, he does a few of those, because he’s being a normal guy and not a fucked up brainwashed killer with a soulmate who doesn’t want him.

Kate stays close, looking more and more concerned.

He’s in the kitchen, refilling his drink, though he’s spilled more than he’s managed to get in his cup, when one of the guys she’d introduced him to wanders over, standing too close.

“Hey,” he says, laughing. “Need a hand?”

Clint lets him take over pouring the drink, leaning dizzily against the counter and rubbing at his head, which feels too heavy and too light at the same time.

After he’s got his drink in his hand again, he takes another sip gratefully. The cool thing about all this fucking beer is that it makes it harder to feel the place in his chest where Bucky always is, and he’s able to offer a crooked, drunk smile at the guy beside him.

“You’re a hero,” he says, raising his cup in salute.

The guy laughs again. “Nah,” he says. “I’m Kyle. You wanna dance?”

Clint remembers that was the point -- Kate wanted him to dance.

He looks down at his feet and frowns thoughtfully, wiggling his toes and trying to decide whether he feels coordinated enough for dancing. He’s pretty sure that at this point, he’d just fall over. And then maybe puke.

He’s about to gently turn the guy down when he starts sliding sideways, tipping over. Aww, no, he’s totally going to fall, and he hadn’t even tried dancing, but apparently the toe wiggling was too much for his fragile sense of balance.

The guy’s still laughing when he grabs Clint by the arm, holding him up, and it’s like a switch flips. Clint’s head is a mess, he’s not in control of anything, and there is a stranger standing in his space and touching his body.

He panics, trying to flinch away but the counter is at his back, and when he tries to pull his arm free, the guy tightens his grip, probably worried Clint’s going to fall.

“Hey, easy,” the guy says, and Clint doesn’t hear it, too lost in panic.

He’s just a mess of flight or fight instinct now, and he can’t run, so instead, he fights, snarling as he shoves himself up away from the counter and against the guy who won’t let him go. He manages to turn him, slamming the guy against the counter hard enough to knock his grip loose, and then, before the guy can regain his balance or get away, Clint’s got him by the arm and is flipping him up over his shoulder and slamming him down into the rickety table that had been holding the now empty bowls of chips.

The table shatters and, as the guy falls through it, Clint falls with him, too drunk to stay on his feet.

In the dizzy, chaotic aftermath, while the guy shouts and the other partygoers scream, Clint his lays there, dazed and confused and still struggling to breathe through the panic.

Kate’s there a second later.

“Jesus Christ,” she says, dropping to her knees beside him. “I just had to pee, for fuck’s sake, what happened? Did you touch him?” She’s glaring daggers at Kyle and she’s totally Clint’s new favourite.

“He was falling over,” Kyle says, climbing to his feet. “I stopped him from braining himself on the counter, if that’s what you mean!”

Kate rolls her eyes and says, “I told all of you not to touch him. I told you. C’mon, Clint, up you get.”

She levers him up to his feet, catching him when he staggers, and lets him curl up against her side. Together, they stagger out of the house and to the curb, Kate flipping off anyone who asks about paying for damages.

Kate lets him collapse to sit on the curb, rummaging around in his pocket for his phone. He flops backwards, sprawled out in the gutter, and spreads his arms, staring up at the sky while she calls -- someone. He doesn’t care. It’s not Bucky so what’s the point.

“Hey. Hi. Is this -- yeah. Hi. Kate. Uh huh. Yeah. Could you come get him? Well, only a little -- no, no one’s bleeding. No one -- I was just in the bathroom! Whatever. Yes. Okay.”

She shoves the phone back in his pocket. “Your friend Natasha is terrifying,” she mumbles, stretching out beside him. “You’re a mess, Clint.”

“Trying to be normal,” he tells her solemnly, and then he rolls over and pukes into the gutter.

She sighs, rubbing his back. “I know.”

*

Natasha picks him up in Sam’s car, shoving him into the passenger seat, cranking the window down for some fresh air, and even dropping Kate at home before turning back towards Sam’s.

As soon as they’re alone, she snaps, “You’re an idiot.”

“Uh huh,” he agrees as they stop at a red light.

A few seconds pass before she says, “All this because Bucky’s off the grid for a few days? This is ridiculous, Clint.”

Clint blinks at her and says, “I’m being normal. So Bucky can leave me. So I don’t need him. I’m trying.”

She shoots him a look and frowns. “Bucky doesn’t want you to be normal. You’re not normal.”

“I know,” he moans. “I flipped Kyle over my shoulder and smashed him through the table with the chips.”

She blinks as they start driving again. “Kyle? Did he do something?”

“Wanted to dance,” he says morosely. 

“Saying no works,” she tells him.

“He was too close. Panicked. Wasn’t thinking.” He pauses and then adds, “I had great form, though. Just like you taught me.”

She looks over him, a fond edge to her smile. “I’m sure you did, lastachka. Now why don’t you tell me what happened to convince you that you need to be normal enough for Bucky to let you go?”

Clint hadn’t told her or Sam about his stupid attempt to kiss Bucky.

He’s quiet for a moment, rolling his forehead against his seatbelt, before confessing, “He wants me to date Kate.”

“Kate’s nice,” Natasha says, non-committal.

“She’s not Bucky, though.”

“Ah.” They take a right turn and Clint sags to the side helplessly before slumping against the door again, one hand out the window. The streetlights above are reminding him of spotlights at the circus -- bright and dark and bright again, and he flattens his hand like he’s flying, like he’s hanging upside down off a trapeze, ready to hit a target.

He doesn’t realize he’s humming the circus music under his breath until they pull up outside Sam’s house and Natasha turns the engine off. His humming is so loud in the sudden silence.

“Listen, Clint,” she says, turning to face him. Once his hand is back inside the car, she starts rolling the window up. “Bucky doesn’t want you to date Kate. And he doesn’t want to leave you.”

“He doesn’t want me to kiss him either.”

“Oh,” she says, slow. She rolls her eyes. “He’s an idiot. Did he tell you that?”

“Nope.” He pops the ‘p’ and slumps sullenly. “He just. He didn’t. Want it. When I did it.”

“But he didn’t say it. Instead, he just, what? Pushed you away?”

“Froze. And looked horrified.”

She sighs, getting out of the car, coming around to help him with his seatbelt. “He’s been panicking for months about how much he wants to kiss you,” she says, with exaggerated patience. “Sam keeps shouting at him about how much damage it’ll do if he tries anything. You’re magically bonded to him and you’ve had aliens messing around in your head. You were so desperate for someone to tell you what to do when we first got you away from Loki, you’d have done anything Bucky wanted you to do. He doesn’t want to be the one telling you what to do. That’s why he sent you to Sam and that’s why he stayed away. So you could figure out what you want on your own.”

It’s too many words, and he slumps against her side with a moan, head on her shoulder.

She sighs. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow. Now, you need water, Advil, and sleep.”

“I wanna shoot my bow,” he declares, because shooting always calms him down and he’s worried he’ll do something like cry if she tucks him into bed and leaves him.

“Sure you do,” she says, but she steers him into the house, up the stairs, into his room. “PJs.”

He scowls at her and says, “Kate says you’re scary.” She only has to lift up one eyebrow though before he’s scrambling to obey, because maybe she’s a tiny bit scary after all.

After she’s got him into bed and force fed him two Advils and an entire glass of water, she says, “We are going to talk about this when you’re sober.”

And then she leaves, door open and hall light on, because she knows how bad the dark can get sometimes.

*

He dreams of Bucky, and long, dark corridors, damp and dim with windows smeared in oil. It smells of damp and engine grease, and the sounds -- water dripping and harsh breathing and muffled footsteps -- echo loudly in the silence.

It’s hazy, off-centred, corridors winding down and down until the walls are stone and lit by mining lamps, so each step forward alternates between light and dark. The smells turn dark, earthy, the silence heavier.

He’s not alone -- SHIELD agents behind, the odd crackle in the comms tucked into his ear, breathing. Steve ahead, leading the way, and a gun held carefully in one hand. He’s got Steve’s back -- he’s always got Steve’s back.

A quick flash -- Steve looking over his shoulder with a grim smile, waving him forward.

Shadows shift and change and there’s the distant sound of water lapping against stone, and then a sudden, crushing darkness as all the lights go out and he can’t see Steve -- he can’t see anything. It’s all sound and touch and smell and the rush of SHIELD agents on all sides like bats in the darkness and he’s scrambling after Steve because this wasn’t the plan, this was never the plan, only he doesn’t know which way to go, just rushes blindly forward. There’s the sudden crack of gunfire, voices over the comms calling for help, for back up, for medical attention, screaming about traps and explosives and tripwires. 

It doesn’t matter, Steve is all that matters, getting to Steve and watching his back, but he can’t see.

And then there’s a crack, an explosion, and the earth on all sides shakes and splinters. The sensation of falling, screaming, twisting into nothingness, smoke and fire giving way to oppressive darkness and then bone-cracking impact, flesh against stone, the breath forced from his lungs.

He’s dead, he’s dead, he has to be dead, this is death. There is no pain, only blackness and a terrifying inability to draw a breath.

And then a whisper.

“There he is, shh, shh, we’ve been looking for you, Sergeant Barnes. Breathe, breathe, we’ve got you, breathe...”

And then there is nothing but a sharp and endless cold that Clint has felt before.

*

He’s tangled in sheets and they’re holding him down but Clint wakes himself up with his screaming. It’s hoarse, hysterical, he can taste Bucky’s blood in his throat, and it was just a nightmare, it had to be a fucking nightmare, it couldn’t be real, because Bucky isn’t with Steve and Bucky didn’t fall and Bucky isn’t gone.

Clint tears at his chest at the place where Bucky used to be but he can’t feel anything but an aching cold anymore and he doesn’t know what that means but he’s sobbing and begging and tearing at his own skin by the time he realizes his phone is ringing.

He scrambles for it and answers, expecting Bucky, but it’s Steve.

“Clint,” he says, and he sounds wrecked. “Is he okay? Can you feel him?”

But Clint can’t anymore and he drops the phone and just keeps screaming.

Natasha gets to him first, flipping the switch and flooding the room with light. She jumps on the bed, straddling him, holding his wrists above his head to stop him from tearing at his chest.

It takes a while for her to get through to him, and she has to shout at him to get him to finally, finally stop screaming and take a deep breath. His eyes are burning, his chest is burning, he’s never been this lost in terror before.

“Tasha,” he moans, and Sam’s there too, he sees suddenly, grabbing Clint’s phone and turning away as he brings it to his ear.

“It was just a dream,” she says, voice calmer now that he’s stopped screaming. “You’re okay, I’ve got you.”

It reminds him of that voice, that hissing whisper, telling Bucky they’d got him, and he screws up his face and pants.

“Not a dream,” he says. “They got Bucky.”

“What?” She’s sharp now, and Sam comes back into the room, looking worried. He holds the phone out to her.

“Steve,” he says, and Natasha takes the phone, still sitting on Clint.

She listens in silence for a moment, eyes on Clint, and then says tersely, “I’m on my way.”

*

Clint gets his shit together and tumbles down the stairs just as Natasha is about to leave.

“I’m coming too,” he says.

Sam makes a face. “Clint,” he starts. “I don’t think --”

“It’s my choice,” Clint tells him, rubbing at the cold in his chest. “You said I get to make my own choices and this is what I’m choosing. I need to help. I can help. I can find him, I can -- Natasha, you know you’ve got a better chance with me than you do without me. I can help.”

She hesitates, Clint can see it, and he hops down the last few steps and says, voice like broken glass, “Please, Nat. Please.”

“Get your bow,” she tells him.

“Natasha,” Sam begins to argue, but Clint doesn’t stick around to listen. He throws himself off the stairs, runs to the cupboard to grab his bow, and then drops to his knees to wrap his arms around Lucky, pressing his tear-streaked face to his neck.

“I’ll get him back,” he says. “I promise.”

Sam is still arguing when Clint follows Natasha out the front door.

*

They drive out of the city to a rural airport hangar, arriving just as a quinjet lands. It had been tense and quiet in the car, Natasha telling Clint that she’d explain everything when they got to Steve, but that there had been a mission and it had gone wrong. Clint’s got a thousand more questions but he’s also got that aching cold in his chest and his throat is raw from screaming and he thinks, if he stays quiet and still and focuses on that place where Bucky used to be, he’ll feel him again.

Natasha takes the pilot’s seat, leaving Bruce to hover near the spot where Clint has curled up with a blanket, clutching his bow and squeezing his eyes shut.

Please, please, please, he thinks, as loudly as he can, hoping Bucky will hear him. Please be okay.

There’s no answer.

Eventually, Bruce brings him a mug of coffee and Clint takes it, grateful for the warmth, even though he can’t bring himself to drink it.

*

They meet up with Steve in a rural area with an old, abandoned military facility on it, cement bunkers built into the hillside. There are half a dozen men and women with him, helping to excavate a collapsed tunnel, and Steve abandons them all to jog towards the quinjet when it lands.

He looks like shit, pale and covered in dust and blood, and he looks relieved when he sees Clint leave the jet.

“Can you feel him?” he asks, urgent, ignoring everyone else. “Bucky always said he could feel you. You can too, can’t you?”

Clint rubs at his chest and hesitates, because there’s something there, but it doesn’t feel like Bucky. “It’s cold,” he confesses, feeling off balance and more than a little afraid. “What happened?”

Steve shoots Natasha a quick look. “It’s classified,” he says, apologetic. “I don’t know if Fury--”

“Bucky’s missing,” she says bluntly. “And Clint’s just about got the best chance of finding him. If you want to wait for Fury to give him the proper clearance level, that’s your decision.”

It’s one that Steve doesn’t take very long to make. “It was an infiltration mission,” Steve says. “Bucky’s been off the grid, searching a bunch of Hydra facilities we got wind of, looking for information about some secret weapon they’d been working on, something about sleeper agents. It was just recon at first and when he found out the weapon was being kept here, Fury sent us, with a STRIKE team, for recovery… They’d taken over this old bunker, tunneled into the hills, and we were making our way back there when the tunnel blew and Bucky was… he fell. We haven’t managed to find him for rescue or -- or recovery. When Tony gets here, I was hoping he could bring me down where Bucky fell to see if we can find him, but he’s not answered any attempts at communication and I can’t -- it’s a long way down, we haven’t managed to get to the bottom of it, and I can’t find him.”

“Tony’s ETA is ten minutes,” Natasha says, but she’s watching Clint, who feels ridiculously off balance here, staring at the STRIKE team working at digging the tunnel out.

“Can you get to where he fell?” he asks, still clutching his bow. “Can I see?”

Steve hesitates again, but not for long, leading Clint past the collapsed tunnel, climbing over a few huge boulders and squeezing through a narrow passageway before they get to the edge of a steep cliff which has been lit up with flares. The light from them spills over the edge of the cliff and disappears into darkness.

It’s silent except for the hissing of the flares and Clint’s own breathing as he stares down into nothing. He kicks a pebble over the edge and doesn’t hear it hit the ground.

How could anyone survive that?

“Steve,” Natasha says quietly from behind him. “If he fell--”

“He’s fine. He’ll be fine. We just have to find him.”

When Tony arrives, he refuses to fly Steve down to the bottom of the cliff, going alone. It takes an achingly long time for him to come back up.

He looks uncharacteristically solemn when he flips his mask up. “Steve,” he says, shooting Natasha a helpless look. “It’s at least 300 feet to the bottom. No one can survive that.”

Clint flinches back away from the edge and Natasha catches him by the shoulder, holding tight.

Steve shakes his head. “Did you find him? Is he there?”

Again, a quick look at Natasha, like Tony’s asking for help. “No,” he says, finally. “Just a lot of blood.”

“Take me down,” Steve says, mouth tight. “If there’s just blood, he must have… gone somewhere. Maybe he’s hurt or…”

“A lot of blood,” Tony says again, and Clint grits his teeth and rubs at his chest and lets Natasha squeeze him tight, like that’s all that’s keeping him together.

But Steve is right. If there’s just blood, then Bucky must have gone somewhere.

“Me too,” he says, stepping forward into the light of the flares. “I need to see too.”

Tony looks at him like he’s only just becoming aware that Clint’s there at all. He sighs. “Can you even feel him?”

“Yes,” Clint says, which is only partially a lie. He can feel something. Surely if Bucky was gone, there wouldn’t be anything there at all, not even that echoing chill.

“I’ll take Steve,” Tony decides. “But you’ve gotta stay up here. It’s not safe.”

“Clint can take care of himself,” Natasha says, sounding remarkably calm considering Bucky’s missing and Steve is on the edge of a breakdown.

“Please tell me you haven’t spent these last months training Loki’s little pet to be even more deadly than he already was,” Tony sighs.

“I’ve been training Bucky’s soulmate,” she says with an easy shrug. “Couldn’t let such a liability go unprotected. Imagine if Hydra found out he had that sort of weakness. Besides, he’s good. An asset to the team, even.”

Clint’s sure if there was any room for him to feel anything other than blind panic right now, he’d be sad at the idea that what he thought was genuine friendship and concern for teaching Clint self defense was actually an effort to plug up what Natasha saw as a weakness on her team. As it is, he’s just barely keeping his head above water here.

“Please,” he says to Tony. “I’m making a goddamned choice.”

Sam would be so fucking proud.

There’s a moment in which he doesn’t think it’s going to work, so Clint says desperately to Steve, “Bucky won’t ever forgive me if I let you go down there without someone watching your back when he’s not here to do it.”

Steve counters with, “Pretty sure he won’t forgive me if I let you get hurt.” But he’s giving in, Clint can tell.

Tony rolls his eyes but he brings Steve down and comes back for Clint, who clings to the Ironman suit and clutches his bow, closing his eyes for the long, long ride down.

Steve’s already setting up flares, illuminating the sharp cavern with eerie, pale light that makes the blood smeared over the rock shimmer in the darkness.

There is so, so much blood.

“That’s not all Bucky’s,” Clint says, numb, as he stares at it. Steve just grimly lights more flares.

“You can feel him,” he says. “So he’s here. C’mon.”

Tony’s gone up for Natasha, and Clint just follows Steve into the darkness where the blood has been smeared.

“There are footsteps,” Steve says, pointing to a boot print pressed into the blood. “He didn’t crawl away -- someone dragged him. Someone was here. Someone found him.”

He sounds hopeful, but Clint just rubs at his chest with one hand, holds his bow with the other, and tries his best not to think of how much fucking blood there is.

*

The tunnel ends abruptly at an outcropping of rock overlooking the coast, and they stopped seeing traces of Bucky’s blood long before then. Steve shouts about tire tracks and calls Tony and Natasha over to see, but Clint is too tired, too broken, to follow.

He stares out over the choppy, steely ocean and wonders what happens next -- Bucky is gone. Dead or taken, who knows. And Clint’s left behind.

He wants to scream but he doesn’t have the energy for it anymore. He just needs sleep. He needs Bucky.

“I fucked it all up,” he says, when Natasha comes over to him. “He just wanted to be my friend and I fucked it up and I kissed him and now he’s gone and I’m not gonna get to see him again to tell him how sorry I am and I didn’t even say goodbye when he left.”

She slides an arm around his shoulders and holds tightly and says, “We have a few hydra agents alive and being transported back to the base. They may know more about what happened here. Hope’s not lost yet, lastachka.”

*

They don’t find him, but they keep looking.

*

Clint dreams but it can’t be real. He dreams of blood, of screaming and begging, of being unmade and remade into something new. He dreams of ice and cold and Loki’s fingers clawing through his chest, looking for Bucky and yanking him out by the roots.

He wakes up tasting his own blood in his throat and his own tears on his lips and decides he’s never gonna sleep again. It’s just not worth it.

And then, days pass and he gets so tired that he can’t remember what’s real and what’s fake and all he knows is that he misses Bucky with every tiny bit of himself, so he sleeps because even if the dreams aren’t real, Bucky’s in them, and it’s the closest he’s gonna get.

*

They don’t find him. And eventually, they run out of places to to look.

*

It’s been two years.

In those two years, Clint has gotten over the hesitation he once felt about aiming his bow at another human being and firing, at taking a life. As long as the life he’s taking belongs to Hydra, they deserve to die, as far as he’s concerned.

Steve still worries sometimes about what Clint is turning into, but that’s the thing. Sometimes Clint thinks that this is just what he’s always meant to be. This is what Loki saw in him, what Loki wanted from him. Only now, he’s doing it for Bucky, which is better than doing it for Loki.

This is vengeance or something like it.

Bucky is gone and he took most of Clint with him and Clint’s gonna cut his way through Hydra until all that’s left is blood and when he’s done, when it’s over, when the blood is washed away, Bucky’ll either be there waiting or he won’t and Clint will figure out what the fuck he’s supposed to do then.

As for now, he kills without hesitation, washes the blood off each night, and and if he’s lucky, sleeps without dreaming. 

His chest is still cold and echoing and empty and sometimes Sam suggests things like calling Kate or going back to his job or going back to DC or doing something, anything, normal, but Clint hasn’t got room in his chest for anything except the broken place Bucky left behind, and Lucky, who doesn’t care how much blood Clint gets on his hands.

Sometimes Coulson mentions maybe, possibly, sending Clint on another sort of mission, or even taking him from this one, just for a break, and Clint doesn’t bother to listen, because if Coulson or Fury or anyone in the fucking world takes him off his mission of finding every last bit of Hydra and destroying it, he’ll leave and do it on his own and he knows Natasha will come with him, and Steve probably will as well, and no one’s willing to lose them.

So he keeps hunting. He gets pretty good at it. He never misses the killshot with his bow, unless he wants to, because sometimes he gets so angry at the Hydra fucker in front of him that he just nails them through somewhere that doesn’t immediately kill and leaves them there to bleed out slowly. 

It makes Steve uncomfortable, but it makes Clint feel better, and it’s really his fucking choice at the end of the day, and he’s gotten really good at making his own choices.

Clint’s got his own room in Tony’s tower now, has had it ever since the first time he was caught trying to sneak out with his bow, intent on tracking down Bucky with or without the Avengers’ help. He’s never in it though, prefering to curl up with Lucky in Bucky’s abandoned room, surrounded by his things.

Sometimes he wakes up when Steve finds him there, quietly tucking him under Bucky’s blanket, but they both pretend Clint never woke up and that his face wasn’t wet with tears.

*

“Sam’s in town for a few days and we thought we’d take him out,” Steve says, cornering Clint in the range as he’s picking his arrows out of the targets. “You wanna come?”

Clint stares at him blankly before turning to his locker, carefully putting the arrows away. “You think that’s the best use of your time?” he asks mildly, before slamming the door shut with a tiny bit too much force.

He hears Steve sigh. “Clint,” he says, and it’s gentle now as he comes to lean against the locker right beside Clint’s. “I think it’s a good idea, yeah. You’ve gotta --”

“I don’t have to do anything,” Clint reminds him, turning away. “But if that’s how you want to spend your time, that’s your choice.”

Steve follows him as he leaves the range, heading towards the elevator. “I know what you’re thinking. You’re gonna go over the last bit of intel we’ve got on Hydra, you’re going to go over the maps again, you’re going to look for something that we missed. But Clint, you’ve been doing that for months. We’ve all been doing that for months. Maybe it’s time we took a break. Cleared our heads. Came back to it tomorrow.”

“Hungover and tired? No thanks.”

Clint steps into the elevator, Steve follows, and Clint rolls his eyes. Steve just keeps trying. “It’s not that I don’t want to find him,” he says. “It’s just… I know he’d be upset with me if he knew I let you get like this.”

“Like what?” Clint asks, finally losing his temper, his voice sharp. “Not giving up?” He snorts. “I’m pretty sure he’d fucking appreciate it, that at least one of us wasn’t ready to just… to just let him be gone. Because he’s not.” He rubs at his chest. It’s still empty and cold. “He’s not.”

Steve just gets even more gentle. “Maybe it’s time to start thinking that maybe… maybe he’s gone, Clint. We didn’t find any evidence -- people just don’t disappear like that. And if he’s gone -- if he’s been gone for two years -- don’t you think we owe it to him to try… I don’t know. Find a way to exist with that reality?”

Closing his eyes, Clint takes a shaky breath. “No,” he says. “Because he’s not gone.”

“Clint.”

“I still dream about him!” he shouts, voice shredded. “I still dream about him, every time I sleep. I know he isn’t gone. I know it.”

“You’ve said yourself that those dreams aren’t real. That they’re nightmares. Clint. I’m -- I’m real sorry. You know I miss him too. But he’d kick my ass if he knew I let you go on like this. Not sleeping. Barely eating. Running yourself into the ground chasing ghost stories.” Steve comes close, grabbing his wrist, right where Bucky left those bruised marks all those years ago. It makes Clint freeze up because everyone is so careful these days not to touch him -- everyone but Natasha. “He’s gone, Clint,” he says, so gentle.

Clint sucks in a harsh breath and twists away. “You don’t get to touch me,” he snarls, and the elevator opens with a cheery chime.

Steve sighs. “Okay,” he says. “If you need me tonight, text me.”

Clint’s too busy storming off down the hall to answer.

*

Clint runs into Brock Rumlow right before Coulson’s assistant makes good on her threat and calls for security to escort him off the SHIELD premises the next morning, after Clint spectacularly loses his temper when neither Coulson, Maria Hill, or Nick Fury are available to talk to him about any new information about Bucky’s disappearance.

Clint should’ve known better than to try getting any information out of anyone without Steve around. He’s not a high enough priority -- not to mention security clearance level -- to be told anything on his own.

Clint’s never all that comfortable at SHIELD. It’s too military, too clean, and Clint’s never felt a part of it, even when Coulson reluctantly gave in to the idea that he wasn’t going to be able to find Bucky without Clint’s help and let him be part of the team. An honourary Avenger with no goddamned super powers, except an ache in his chest that might lead him to Bucky.

“I’m sorry,” the assistant says. She’d started off polite and professional, if a little apologetic, and now she’s all steel. “Coulson can’t see you, Clint. You’re going to have to come back later. If you don’t leave, I’m going to have to call security.”

Clint is tired and he’s angry and he’s never been the best at emotional regulation, but he recognizes the agent who steps in and says, “Don’t worry about about security, Karen. I’ve got this.”

Rumlow had been one of agents on the STRIKE team who’d been with Bucky the day everything had gone wrong, and now he was heading up SHIELD’s investigation into Bucky’s disappearance.

That’s the only reason he lets Rumlow grab him roughly and escort him out of Coulson’s assistant’s office, into the elevator, and down to the shooting range, which was empty this early in the morning.

“You okay, Barton?” Rumlow asks, sitting on the edge of a long table, arms crossed over his chest. “Looking a little rough.”

“I’d feel a lot better if anybody in this goddamn place would do their jobs and find Bucky,” Clint snaps.

Rumlow smiles a little, eyebrows going up. “Ah,” he says. “That’s right. You only joined Cap’s team after that. He around today?”

Clint snorts. “If he was, people would probably give a shit and actually tell us if there are any updates.”

Nodding slowly, Rumlow says, “I guess. You know, I never could figure how you got on the team. I mean, no offence, but the Avengers aren’t exactly recruiting very often and, when they do… Well, they usually go for someone a little more… impressive. Not that I’m not impressed by your scores at the range. But you know what I mean.”

“Someone less ordinary,” Clint says, crossing his on arms now, feeling defensive. “I’m not an Avenger. I’m just… I’m just helping find Bucky.”

“Yeah.” Rumlow cocks his head. “And weren’t you the one with Loki? You were. I thought I recognized you. Lot of good SHIELD agents died over that.”

Clint feels the ground grow a little shakier under his feet, his indignation and rage faltering, and he hugs himself more tightly. “That wasn’t me,” he says. “Loki used mind control.”

“Yeah,” Rumlow agrees, solemn and serious. “But. I mean. You did it. Right?”

“Do you -- is there any update, about Bucky? I just need to know where to look next, so I can--”

Rumlow interrupts him. “Clint Barton,” he says, abrupt. “That’s your name, isn’t it? That’s what Karen called you.”

“Yes?”

Rumlow slides down off the table, suddenly looking much more at ease. “And you’ve been looking for him all this time. You guys must’ve gotten to know each other pretty well after everything with Loki. That’s what happened, right? That’s how you know him? The Avengers took you into custody, after Loki was dealt with.”

“I didn’t -- I didn’t have anything to do with what happened,” Clint tells him. “When Bucky got hurt. That wasn’t me. I just need to find him. Do you know anything? If you don’t, I should go, I--”

“Oh jesus,” Rumlow says with a laugh. “I know you had nothing to do with it, don’t worry. I’m just curious… You seem pretty torn up about it. I mean, it’s been two years. Not even Cap is looking anymore. But you. You aren’t willing to let it go. So. What’s with you and Barnes? Seems like you musta been pretty close.”

“He was -- we were -- not like that,” Clint says, inching towards the door a little bit. “We just… we were friends, and I…”

Nodding like he gets it, Rumlow says, “I’m sure he’s really, really wanting to see you again, Barton. And I’ll do my best to make sure he does, okay? You just gotta trust me.”

Clint’s eyes go wide. “So there’s been more information? You know where to look? You don’t think he’s dead? I know he’s not, but I just can’t--”

Clapping a heavy hand on Clint’s shoulder, Rumlow says, “Shh, shh. Bring it down a little, Barton. New information has come to light, yeah, but I’m not sure how it’ll shake out. Let me look into it, see where it takes me, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Okay?”

“No, just tell me, I need --”

Rumlow ushers him back towards the elevator. “Sorry, kid. You don’t have the clearance for it.”

Clint is going to fucking kill the next person who tells him that.

*

Natasha has been off the grid, following up on her own sources, for three weeks, so when her name pops up on his phone a few hours later, he answers it.

“Did you find anything?” he asks, without wasting time with pleasantries.

“Happy to hear from you too.” She sounds a little breathless, a lot annoyed. “Listen, where are you? Steve says you’re not at the tower.”

“I’m not,” he says, though he’s been making his way home, slowly. The idea of going back to his maps and his notes and all his failed attempts to find Bucky makes him want to run away screaming. “I’m on my way back from SHIELD. Did you find anything?”

“Yeah,” she says. “You’re not gonna like it. I need you to get home, stay there, stay safe. Stay away from SHIELD.”

Clint frowns. “I’m on the train, won’t be back for another hour or so. Why?”

“I think SHIELD’s been compromised,” she tells him. “I’ll explain when I get there. Just get back to Steve, stay safe, sit tight. I’ll be there --”

Clint, to be honest, does not give a fuck about SHIELD. “That has nothing to do with Bucky, you’re supposed to be looking for Bucky.”

He can hear her growl a little over the phone. “You are just going to have to trust me,” she says. “I’ll explain.” She hangs up without another word and it’s just more fuel to the frustration he’s already feeling. If not even Natasha is looking for Bucky right now, if Clint is the only one still looking for him, what chance does he have of finding Bucky at all?

He rubs at his chest and tries to calm his uneven breathing and then his phone lights up with another call, from an unknown number. He answers.

“Hey, Barton,” Rumlow says. “You still in D.C.? I found something you’re gonna want to see.”

Clint gets off at the next station without looking back.

*

They pile into a black SUV -- Clint, Rumlow, and three other members of the STRIKE team, all heavily armed and dressed in black, which makes Clint feel a little out of place in his purple hoodie and torn up jeans.

Rumlow sees him eyeing up all the automatic weapons in the SUV and smirks, handing him a wicked looking knife. “Just in case,” he says ominously. “You’ll be fine.”

“Where are we going?” Clint asks as they SUV pulls out of the SHIELD garage and merges into traffic.

“You’ll see.”

Clint’s never been all that good at navigating DC, so he loses track of the streets as they navigate deeper into the city, arriving at an industrial area he doesn’t recognize as the sun starts to set. Around him, the STRIKE agents get progressively more tense the longer they are in the vehicle together. No one talks, no one teases each other, no one makes inappropriate comments about anybody else. It’s about as different from the Avengers as Clint can imagine.

By the time the SUV pulls to a stop outside a large industrial complex, he’s developing an anxiety-induced stomach ache from the tension.

He nervously fiddles with the knife as they get out of the SUV, following Rumlow into the complex, which is just as dark and filled with shadows as Clint imagined it would be.

“Is this a Hydra facility?” he asks, and the STRIKE agent beside him flinches when he breaks the oppressive silence.

“Shut your mouth, Barton,” Rumlow says, easy, leading the way deeper into the winding mess of concrete halls. There are no windows, the air is humid and stale, and Clint thinks the place has to be abandoned.

Then Rumlow steps into a small room that looks like it may once have been an office. He opens a drawer in a rotting desk, slides back a panel Clint would have missed if he’d been in here himself, and hits a hidden switch. The far wall rumbles a little, shakes, and then slides open, revealing a doorway with a pitch black stairwell leading down into the darkness.

Clint struggles to control his breathing, because this place -- the darkness, the damp, the hidden stair wells and the smell of musk and mildew -- all reminds him of dream he’d had the night he’d lost Bucky.

He wants to run, to hide, to find some dark and secret place to curl up and shake and wait for Steve to come find him.

And then there’s a gutteral, harsh, broken scream from somewhere down the stairs, and Clint’s need to run away is forgotten. Instead, he’s staggering forward with a wild, feverish urgency, stumbling down the steps and towards that cry because he has heard that scream in his dreams every goddamn night for two years.

It’s Bucky.

One of the STRIKE agents reaches out to stop him, but Rumlow just shakes his head and follows Clint down into the darkness.

Clint makes it to the bottom of the stairs before he has the breath to scream Bucky’s name, but there’s no answer, just a strange silence, broken only by the distant snap of electric current. Clint follows the sound, his nose starting to sting with the scent of something burning, and then he rounds a corner and smashes right into a wall of windows, overlooking what appears to be a doctor’s office, though the lights there are anemic, green, and flickering. The tile floor is old and cracked, stained with blood and other fluids. 

And in the middle of the room, strapped to a chair with metal restraints, some strange machinery around his head, is Bucky.

He’s shirtless, his chest heaving, sweat running down it, his hair much longer than Clint remembers, sticking to his cheeks and his lips. The hum of electricity comes from the chair and whatever it’s doing to Bucky, and in the few seconds it takes Clint to process what he’s seeing, the sound starts winding down, eventually falling silent.

“Oh god,” Clint breathes, torn between horror at what’s happened to Bucky and elation because he knew, he knew Bucky was still alive. “Oh god, Rumlow, it’s Bucky, you found Bucky, someone needs to call Steve, oh god.” He scrambles to the door leading to the little laboratory, yanking on the handle, but it’s locked and he doesn’t have his lock pick, why the fuck didn’t he bring his lock pick?

“We need to get him out,” Clint babbles, yanking on the door, kicking it, trying to break the glass with his fist. Bucky doesn’t twitch, doesn’t look over, doesn’t move, just keeps breathing. At least he’s fucking breathing. “Bucky, just hold on, I’m gonna get you out, I’m gonna -- give me a gun, I’ll shoot the lock out.”

He turns to the STRIKE team and that’s when he realizes the STRIKE team has stayed silent, hasn’t been helping him try to break Bucky out. Instead, two of them stand by the doorway leading to the hall and back up the stairs, looking nervous. The others are watching Bucky, fingers on the triggers of their automatic weapons. And Rumlow is watching Clint, his arms crossed over his chest, leaning against the wall, that small, smug smirk on his face.

“You’re going to hurt yourself if you keep hitting the glass,” Rumlow says. “It’s reinforced. I’m surprised we could hear him screaming through it. He musta lost the bite plate, that usually keeps him quiet.”

Clint doesn’t have time to unpack that. He needs to get to Bucky. He needs Steve and Natasha and Tony and most of all Bucky.

“Help me,” Clint says.

Rumlow pushes himself off the wall, coming over lazily. 

He pulls a key out of his pocket, slips it into the lock, and turns it. It opens silently, door swinging open as it does, and Clint just stares for half a second.

But Bucky is there and Bucky is hurt and Clint doesn’t have time for Rumlow and his key and his knowledge of how strong the glass is and how loud Bucky had to have been screaming to be heard through it.

He trips over his own feet as he staggers into the laboratory, straight to Bucky’s side.

“I got you,” he says. “I got you, Bucky, I got you.” He’s hesitant to touch because he doesn’t know where Bucky’s hurt, the only blood he sees is leaking from Bucky’s mouth, is staining his hands and the sides of his chest, but none of it seems fresh. 

So Clint touches the feverish skin of his forearm, right above the metal restraint holding him down. Bucky doesn’t even flinch beneath his touch, doesn’t make a sound to indicate he’s in pain, so Clint runs his hands up to Bucky’s bare shoulders, to his neck, to his cheeks, trying to turn his head to force Bucky to open his eyes, to look at Clint, to acknowledge that Clint is there.

Bucky doesn’t move. Clint isn’t sure he can move, with the machinery and the restraints. He tugs at them and behind him, Rumlow hits a switch and the machinery pulls away from his head, restraints falling from his wrists.

Bucky sits up, slow, opening his eyes. His face is blank, his eyes are blank, he doesn’t look at Clint at all, and something cracks wide open in Clint’s chest as he lets his hands fall away.

“Ready to comply,” Bucky says, and it’s not his voice. It’s lower, rougher, broken from screaming.

“Bucky,” Clint says, barely breathing.

“See, the thing is,” Rumlow says, stepping up behind Clint. “I didn’t know your name. You were barely an Avenger, why the fuck would I care what your first name was? So when the Soldier started screaming your name, none of us knew who he meant.” He chuckles. “Figured he’d shout for Rogers.”

Clint closes his eyes. “The Soldier?” he says finally. He’s such an idiot, Natasha’s gonna kill him, she warned him to stay away from SHIELD and what did he do? Went off somewhere dark and off the grid with a fucking STRIKE team. Part of SHIELD. Apparently the part that had been compromised. The part that had known where Bucky was this whole time.

“We had him before,” Rumlow says, still sounding friendly. “Picked him up all torn up overseas, after he drove over an IED. Nursed him back to health, made him part of a pilot program designed to create super soldiers, sleeper agents we could embed with special forces all over the world. Then Rogers had to go get hopped up on the same shit and tear our organization apart looking for him. Nice way to repay us for keeping him alive.”

Clint rubs angrily at the tears on his face. He doesn’t even know when he started to cry. “What have you done to him?”

“The mental recalibration has been tricky. We’ve stripped him of everything -- every bit of personality that makes him who he was, and filled the holes up with who we want him to be, but somehow, it hasn’t stuck. Within a week, he starts asking for you. It’s the damnedest thing. So when I realized that you, Barton, the least memorable Avenger, also happened to be the Clint that Barnes seemed incapable of forgetting, I thought I should arrange a reunion.”

“Mental recalibration,” Clint echoes, but he’s barely listening. All that matters is that Rumlow just admitted that whatever they’ve done -- however they’ve tried to take Bucky apart, it doesn’t last. Clint can fix it. He can figure out how to fix it. Even if he has to start by breaking Bucky’s nose, the way Natasha broke Clint’s back when Clint was the one who’d been recalibrated -- whatever it takes, Clint can fix this.

He just needs to get rid of Rumlow and his four STRIKE agent buddies first.

One step at a time.

He palms the knife Rumlow gave him, takes a deep, steadying breath, and then spins in a flurry of movement, launching himself at Rumlow.

He doesn’t even get close to bridging the two feet between them before he’s jerked back by his hair. He’s got a split second to realize that it’s Bucky -- Bucky has him by the hair -- and then he’s being tossed across the room, into a metal cart with a tray of medical implements on it, falling to the dirty floor and smashing his head against the wall.

Rumlow hadn’t even lifted a finger. He’s still watching, smug, arms crossed.

“Bucky,” Clint pants, his head aching. “Please.”

“I have a mission for you, Soldier,” Rumlow says, and Bucky’s head jerks around from where he’d been staring at Clint to look at Rumlow, his shoulders loosening. “You know your purpose.”

“Eliminate the Avengers,” Bucky reports, barely any inflection in his tone.

“Yeah. Well. I brought you one of them.” Rumlow hands Bucky a pistol and jerks his chin at Clint. “Hawkeye. We might as well start with him.”

“No,” Clint says, trying to scramble to his feet, but moving makes his head throb and nausea roll in his stomach. “No, Bucky won’t hurt me.”

Bucky cocks the gun and Rumlow says, “He’s not Bucky. He’s the Winter Soldier.”

“That’s a stupid fucking name,” Clint spits, pushing himself up and hanging onto the wall for balance. Everything spins sickeningly. “And it’s not his. He’s James Buchanan Barnes.”

Clint’s still got the knife and he stumbles forward, eyes locked on Rumlow. He’ll kill Rumlow and get Bucky out of here and --

Bucky aims the gun at him and Clint freezes. Bucky cannot kill him. Bucky would never forgive himself if he hurt Clint and Clint knows what that feels like. He’s been the one waking up from brainwashing with blood on his hands that won’t ever wash off and he will not be responsible for the blood on Bucky’s.

“Please,” he says, forgetting Rumlow now, eyes locked on Bucky’s cold face. “Bucky. You don’t want to do this. You know me.”

“You’re my mission,” Bucky says, like he’s agreeing. His finger tightens on the trigger.

“No. I’m -- I’m Clint. You know me. You’ve been -- we’ve been dreaming of each other since we were kids. Bucky, don’t. Please don’t. Steve’s looking for you -- I want to take you home to him. Okay? Let me take you home.”

“I am home.”

The walls shake suddenly, there’s a muffled boom that sends trails of dust spinning from the ceiling, and Rumlow curses. Outside the small lab, the STRIKE agents are panicking, shouting, and Clint isn’t sure what’s going on, but he’s hoping it’s a rescue.

“Stop hesitating and kill him,” Rumlow snaps, before storming out of the room.

Clint uses the distraction as his opportunity to rush Bucky, knife clutched in his fist, intending to use his momentum to smash Bucky in the face, the same way Natasha had ‘recalibrated’ him before. Bucky’s nose might break, but it’s better than the alternative.

He lacks a lot of Natasha’s grace, however, not to mention he’s got a pretty massive concussion, and he stumbles. He twists before he falls, managing to kick out at Bucky, knocking the gun to the side, falling from Bucky’s grip, even as he backhands Clint across the face with his metal hand and something cracks. Clint can taste his own blood but it doesn’t matter, he keeps throwing himself at Bucky, desperate to somehow get through to him.

He’s begging as he does it, but Bucky is relentless, and doesn’t care how much pain he inflicts. He slams his fists into Clint’s face again and again until Clint falls to the ground, his face cracking open until his words become meaningless cries of pain and desperation.

He makes one last try, staggering to his feet and swinging his fist for Bucky’s face, but Bucky grabs him by the wrist, his grip so tight, Clint can feel his bones creaking. He loses all sense of balance when Bucky spins him, pins his wrist awkwardly behind him, presses the pistol to his temple, and then freezes like a wall of stone behind him.

Clint isn’t even sure if Bucky is breathing, but he knows he isn’t. He can’t through the blood running down his face, down his throat, bubbling around his lips. He can barely see through it and his eyes are squeezed shut beneath the swelling, his wrist is screaming in pain. Tears and blood mix on his face.

He waits for the gunshot, the pain, but instead, there’s only silence.

And then he realizes that Bucky’s hand is pressed to the marks on Clint’s wrist, the faint bruises that Bucky left there when they first met at the circus, and somewhere deep in Clint’s chest, that cold, echoing and empty place where Bucky used to be cracks and starts to break open.

He feels Bucky again, just a little -- the faintest echo of sensation. It’s a spinning mess of pain, terror, grief, loss, and hopelessness and Clint sobs a little because he knows what he’s feeling is only a shadow of what Bucky’s been feeling this entire time.

“I’m sorry,” he says, words a broken rush through split and swelling lips, but Bucky doesn’t move or breathe. “I’m sorry, I should have found you, I should have looked harder, I should have -- You’re James Buchanan Barnes. Bucky. You’re my -- you’re mine, you’re the only good thing I get to have, even though I never deserved it, and if that’s why our souls connected when we were kids, because somehow they knew that I’d need you to come back from Loki, than that means I can help you come back from this. Please, Bucky, please don’t.”

Bucky takes a breath, a deep, aching one that Clint can feel against his back, and then the door flies open and Rumlow is there, looking furious.

“We don’t have time for this shit,” he snarls. “Your mission is to eliminate him. Do it. We’ve got to get out of here. If you can’t even handle this part of your mission, we’ll have to recalibrate and try again --”

Bucky shoots him, right between the eyes.

Clint sucks in a breath as Rumlow falls, but before he can even figure out what the fuck is happening, Bucky shoves him forward and Clint falls in an ungainly mess of broken, bloodied limbs on top of Rumlow’s body.

And then Bucky turns the gun, aims, and fires again, and everything goes black in a bloody, fiery rush of pain.

*

Clint wakes up which is, in itself, a miracle. He’s spent countless hours watching videos of Bucky shooting online, he knows how good his aim is.

He’s only got half a second to marvel at having woken up, however, before the pounding in his head overtakes all conscious thought and he’s shoving himself onto his side and violently vomiting from the pain of it. The movement just makes it worse, and he flinches, trying to curl up as small as he can, but there’s so much pain. He can’t breathe, can’t think, and when the heaving finally eases, he’s bathed in sweat and each breath catches in his throat in a whimper.

He holds very still, focuses on breathing, and wills the pain to fade a bit, and gradually, it does. His head his throbbing and he’s had enough concussions to know he’s dealing with a substantial one. His body feels battered and bruised, but the worst pain seems localized on his side, above his hip, which is burning like it’s on fire. He presses one hand to it instinctively to ease the pain, and swallows back a whine as the pain just increases.

When he thinks he’s got himself under a bit of control, Clint eases himself, inch by inch, away from his puddle of vomit, and tries to get his bearings.

Opening his eyes hurts but he forces back the nausea enough to do it. He’s in a room, rundown but homey, definitely not an underground Hydra compound. There are threadbare curtains on a window across the room, there’s peeling wallpaper, the floor is cracked lino. It’s a kitchen, old and small. 

And Bucky is leaning against the cupboards a few feet away, one knee pulled up, metal arm looped around it, absently flipping the knife Rumlow had given Clint with his other hand.its a habit Clint recognizes, the same one Bucky had done the first time Clint woke up in the Tower to find himself being watched this way, but this time he’s watching Clint with a wary, cold expression on his face, and he doesn’t look like Bucky at all.

“You shot me,” Clint says, voice barely a rasp.

Bucky flips the knife again. “Non-lethal,” he says.

Clint closes his eyes. He sees Rumlow, blood blossoming from the gunshot wound between his eyes, falling. He swallows hard. “Why?”

“I don’t know.”

Clint accepts that, trying to sort through his muddy thoughts, to come up with a plan. Chances are, whatever his plan is will have to wait until he can move without puking.

“I need a hospital,” he tries.

“No.”

Clint nods, just a little, and then chokes back another whimper. He keeps his eyes squeezed shut, keeps breathing, and then worries he’s going to die. Something cracked when he hit his head, there’s more pain than he’s ever felt before, and he’s afraid he might still be bleeding from wherever Bucky shot him. If he is dying, then he doesn’t have much time.

“This isn’t your fault,” Clint tells Bucky, words faint, broken by the careful way he’s breathing. “I need you to remember. If -- if something happens and I -- it isn’t your fault.”

“I told you,” Bucky snaps. “Non-lethal.”

“You know me,” Clint mumbles. “You’ll remember. What you did -- it’s not your fault.”

Because Clint knows what it’s like to feel the itch of other people’s blood under his nails and how difficult it is to breathe through the guilt.

“You’re my mission,” Bucky tells him, cold.

“Then why didn’t you kill me?”

Bucky keeps flipping the knife, Clint can hear it, faster and faster. Finally, Bucky gets to his feet and Clint braces himself and opens his eyes to look up at him. “I didn’t want to,” he says, and then adds, “I could change my mind.”

Clint can’t help smiling, just a little. “That’s good,” he says. “Making choices is good. Sam said that so many times.”

Bucky hesitates for a moment and then scowls, leaving the room. Clint lets himself relax, just a little. Just a bit. Just… he just needs a little bit of a rest. He’ll figure this out when his head doesn’t hurt so bad.

*

He jerks awake with a strangled scream some time later. It’s dark now, and Bucky has apparently just kicked him in the shin to wake him.

He drops a bottle of percocet on the floor beside him and a bottle of water. Both are probably stolen but Clint doesn’t care -- he’ll deal with the moral ramifications and lingering addiction later. Those are Future Clint’s problems. 

After he swallows the pills, he sits up slowly, carefully, and watches Bucky sit on the edge of the kitchen counter. Someone’s cleaned up the vomit, and Clint vaguely remembers his blood smeared all over the lino as well. That’s gone too.

“Bucky,” Clint rasps, and Bucky pulls out that fucking knife again, like it’s a nervous habit, flipping it between his fingers.

“Soldier,” he says.

“Soldier. Okay. Who were you before you were the soldier?”

The knife flips faster and Bucky doesn’t answer.

Clint pokes gingerly at the bandages on his side, peeling them back, blinking at the perfectly neat stitches there. “Who taught you First Aid?” he asks, quiet. “Who taught you stitching and wound cleaning and non-lethal shots? I bet Rumlow and his goons didn’t teach you that.”

Bucky still doesn’t reply, but he hasn’t walked out either, so Clint thinks maybe he’s making some progress. He pushes.

“Your name is James Buchanan Barnes. Bucky. You were a soldier. You -- that’s where you lost your arm. We met when you were 17, when I picked your pocket at the circus, and I tripped and you caught me and --”

The knife slams into the drywall an inch away from Clint’s temple, and he freezes, breath catching, staring at Bucky, who reaches forward and takes him roughly by the wrist. He twists and Clint cries out with pain, half worried Bucky is going to break his wrist.

Instead, he just holds Clint’s arm very carefully and studies the fingerprint bruises he’d left there back at the circus. He brushes one finger over the mark, gentle, and says, “I know this.”

Clint’s breath lodges in his throat again, but for a different reason this time, and he whispers, “Yeah, you do. You know me. You know Steve. You know --”

Bucky drops his wrist and, without moving away, yanks his soft red shirt up over his head and drops it to the ground beside Clint. He presses his metal hand to his side, above his own hip, and Clint can see faint fingerprint bruises there.

“They’re like this,” Bucky says. “Tell me what this is.”

Clint can’t breathe. He’s had these fucking marks on his wrist since he was 15 years old and he never thought -- never wondered if he’d left a mark on Bucky too, and Bucky had never said, and the stupidest part is, he can’t remember the first time he touched Bucky. Doesn’t know when his hand landed there, when he left those marks. Doesn’t know if it was at the circus, when he’d tripped, or after -- when Natasha had broken his nose and dragged him back to the tower and he’d latched onto Bucky as the only familiar thing in a world that’d gone crazy. Or if he’d done it when he’d nearly fallen from the roof and Bucky had dragged him back. Or if it had happened while he’d been curled up against Bucky’s side in those hazy few days before Bucky had sent him to Sam’s.

But he knows that his will hand fit that mark perfectly, and maybe, if he presses his hand there again, Bucky will remember.

At first, when Clint presses his palm there, there’s nothing -- a brush of warm, soft skin beneath his hand. And then it’s like a rush of energy as Clint draws a breath -- sweet and bright and rolling through him like the waves of the ocean, bringing with it a burst of memories, all bittersweet and soft the way memories are. It’s cotton candy and grease paint and circus music and glitter, it’s Clint, young and scared and bruised all to hell, restrained in a hospital room. It’s terror as Clint almost falls from the roof and pulling him to safety and holding him tight, and finally letting him go because he needs more help than Bucky can give. It’s months and months of long distance communication, of brightening up every time he gets a text or a picture or a phone call from Clint, so brightly that Steve laughs at him and starts to use it to distract him during training. It’s rushing through debriefs and missions and boring stuff so he can text Clint again. It’s nearly bursting clear out of his skin in excitement when he finally gets to see Clint again. It’s breaking his own damned heart to let Clint go because Clint gets to make his own choices and having this bond doesn’t mean having Clint and Clint deserves a normal life and Bucky is anything but normal.

It’s breaking his own damned heart all over again when Clint kisses him and Bucky has to push him away.

And then it’s screaming for him again and again and again but hoping that Clint never finds him, not here, not like this, because there’s nothing left of Bucky to find.

Clint is panting, sweating, crying when Bucky wrenches away.

“No,” Clint begs. “Wait, Bucky, wait.”

But Bucky looks haunted, broken, terrified, and he’s going to run. Clint just knows he is. He reaches out as Bucky stumbles backwards to the door and says, “Please don’t go, please. I can help you. Please don’t make me look for you again, please, I looked everywhere, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, don’t leave me, please, we can fix this.”

But Bucky just shakes his head wildly and says, “I don’t know you.”

He slams the door behind himself on the way out and Clint tries to get up, to go after him, but there’s too much pain and he can’t get off the floor. He cries until the painkillers kick in and he falls asleep, curled up on the floor.

*

Clint wakes up in a narrow bed, tucked into a gable bedroom, covered in a handmade quilt that smells of storage. His phone, cracked and a little worse for wear, is on the pillow beside him, turned on, over 30 texts of varying degrees of panic from Steve, Natasha, Coulson, Tony, Sam and who knows who else.

Bucky is gone.

*

Bucky’s not there and Clint doesn’t know where to start looking, even if he had the energy or ability to get up out of bed, and he’s already slipping into a feverish, delirious state of panic when someone kicks the door in downstairs.

It’s probably Steve. He’s always had a thing for dramatics.

Natasha finds him first, though, sweeping into the room and already doing a threat assessment even as she speaks to the others through her comms. Then she’s yanking the blanket off him, visually categorizing his wounds, and calling for medevac.

Only when she’s done all that does she press a cool hand to his forehead and snap, “I’m going to kill you.”

“Tasha,” Clint mumbles, holding onto her wrist, struggling to stay conscious. “It was Bucky, Tasha, I found Bucky.”

He feels the jolt of shock run through her, just the barest tremble, and then she says calmly, “Steve, we’ve got a problem.” And then, to Clint, she says, “Where is he, lastachka?”

Clint just shakes his head and tries to sit up and something twists and cracks in his chest and everything’s gone again.

*

He wakes up in a hospital. Not even the medical floor at the Tower.

He’s hooked up to a bunch of monitors, one of which is providing him with drugs that put Bucky’s stolen percocet to shame.

Natasha is sitting beside him, sipping a coffee, and Clint feels adrift as he stares at her mug and wonders if she’d share.

“You’ve got a fractured jaw,” she tells him. “I’m not sharing my coffee.”

Clint is definitely on the good drugs. He hums and says, “Only that? Not so bad.”

“Thirty-six stitches,” she adds. “Not including the stitches to the gunshot wound on your side. In fact, those are just the stitches on your face. Also, your nose is broken. Cheekbone fractured. You’ve got swelling in your brain. You’re lucky you’ve still got all your teeth. They can’t tell the extent of sprains or muscle tears in your shoulders, arms and wrists because of the extensive swelling. Oh. And, you’ve got an infection. In the gunshot wound. The one that someone else did an admirable job of stitching up, if the nurse’s comments are anything to go by.”

Clint pats his stitched up side with a bandaged hand, feeling just a little bit proud. “He did pretty good,” he says. “Didn’t even kill me.”

“Which is great,” she says. “Because I’m going to.”

“Aw, no, Tasha, you can’t,” he says, all wide eyed and tragic. Or he would be, if his left eye wasn’t swollen completely shut and his right nearly there as well. “I gotta find Bucky.”

She sighs, slumping a bit in her chair, and that’s how he knows she’s been worried, that she’s relieved that he’s (mostly) okay. “You’re an idiot,” she tells him. “I said SHIELD had been compromised, and what do you do? Go running off with them. We couldn’t find you -- we had to track Rumlow’s SUV, and then all we found was a bunch of dead SHIELD agents, including Rumlow, and a bunch of your blood. It was -- We thought you were dead.”

“He wouldn’t kill me,” Clint tells her, hazy. It’s hard to talk around the swelling in his face, but it’s blissfully pain-free. He licks at his bottom lip and feels stitches against his tongue and grimaces. “He tried.”

“I can see that,” she says, and Clint huffs a muffled giggle around a yawn. “Go to sleep. You’re a mess.”

“I’ll find him when I wake up,” he says.

“Sure you will.”

*

Clint dreams of darkness, shadows broken by jarring streetlights and the flashing red and blue of police cars, ambulances. Silence broken by shrill sirens. He dreams of panic echoing in his chest, of running, hiding where the shadows are thicker, of warring needs -- the need to get as far away from here as possible, and the need to get closer.

He dreams of struggling to breathe, of struggling to think, of struggling to keep himself from tearing the unlucky people around him to pieces.

He dreams of finding his way through a stark white maze filled with enemies, of doing his best to sneak past undetected, of too many windows and unguarded sight lines and too many people watching and of finally, finally, slipping into a dark and quiet room and just… watching.

“Bucky,” he says, feverish and reaching out in the darkness, towards where the shadows are darkest. “Hey, Bucky, hey, don’t leave me, don’t go.”

Everything is hazy, complicated and confused and Clint can’t tell where he ends and where he begins and what time it is or where he is or if he’s asleep and dreaming or awake or somewhere in between. All he knows is that the shadows are breathing and he can feel Bucky’s terror, confusion, panic taking root in his own chest and he rubs bandaged hand against his sternum and reaches out with the other one.

And then Bucky’s there, stepping out of those shadows and standing over his bed and Clint’s got one moment of wondering if maybe Bucky’s here to finish it, and then, instead, Bucky’s leaning down and pressing his flesh and blood hand to Clint’s bandaged up wrist, right over where his marks would be.

“You know me,” Clint reminds him, but Bucky’s face is in shadow and Clint can’t see if he recognizes this version of Bucky at all. He reaches blindly with his other hand for Bucky’s side, for the marks he left, and he giggles breathily and says, “It’s like we’re dancing now, like this, like you said.”

Bucky’s grip tightens on Clint’s wrist and Clint feels him breathe out, carefully and slowly.

“Clint,” he says, tentative, like it’s a question, like he’s not sure, and Clint can feel the misery, the pain in just that word, but it’s his name, so it still sounds like a revelation, and he beams up at Bucky.

“Yeah,” he says. “That’s me. You know me. You know me more than anybody. Don’t go, okay, just stay -- Steve is coming, Steve’ll be here, we’ll help you, we’ll --”

Bucky jerks away, looking at the door like he expects someone to burst in at any moment, and Clint grabs the sleeve of his sweater and clings and says, “No, please, just stay. Stay with me.”

But Bucky takes an uncertain step back and Clint whispers, “Just stay. I won’t tell, just stay. Hide under the goddamned bed for all I care. I won’t tell.”

But Bucky walks away and Clint isn’t sure he was ever awake at all.

*

Clint’s not sure how many days pass before they start weaning him off the medication, but he’s not a fan when they do. Everything hurts and he misses the hazy, dreamlike state he was in before, and now that he’s somewhat conscious, he has to think about things and their implications.

Things like the fact that he’s pretty sure Bucky has visited him at least once, lurking in the shadows of his hospital room and somehow undetected by whatever guard system Steve has in place.

Natasha has been silent whenever Clint’s tried to pry details on what’s happening outside of his little room of misery and pain, but he’s only been somewhat conscious for a few hours when Steve shows up, followed by Sam.

Steve has visited, of course, though only for long enough to reassure himself that Clint was healing, and to pretend he wasn’t frustrated as fuck at Clint’s inability to coherently recall what had happened to him and how Bucky was involved.

Now, however, the doctors have probably told him that Clint is awake and conscious and coherent and irritable.

“Clint,” Sam says, looking shocked at the extent of the damage. “Jesus.”

“I’m doing better,” Clint says, because he is. Sort of. It doesn’t feel like it, but he’s gotta be doing better.

Steve, though, gets right down to business. “We’ve been looking at the chair. Tony’s taking it apart, trying to figure out how it -- what it did.”

Clint flinches, closes his eyes, breathes out carefully, and says, “Right. The chair. There was, uhm. Bucky was in it, and there was electricity, and he was screaming. Rumlow said…” He trails off, trying to remember. “He said there was usually a bite plate that kept him quiet.”

“Jesus,” Sam says again.

“Did he say anything else?” Steve asks urgently.

“He said they started the process before, when Bucky lost his arm, before you… got bigger. And then they took him back to finish it, but it… whatever they were doing to his brain, it wasn’t lasting, so they kept doing it, over and over and over, because within a week, he would start remembering.” He swallows down the nausea in the back of his throat. “And he’d start calling out for me.”

“A week,” Steve echoes, frowning, walking to the window. Clint nervously wonders if Bucky is really here, if he’s ever actually been here, if he’s listening, or if it had all been a fever dream. “So. So he’d be remembering now.”

Clint reflexively presses at the sore spot on his chest, where he’s been feeling echoes of Bucky’s terror and confusion, blooming like a flower and growing more and more vivid by the day. “He’s been remembering for a while,” he says, quiet. “But it’s… not helping. It’s making him more scared.”

“Well, yeah,” Sam says. “If he’s got some fucked up version of Steve’s super soldier serum, and his brain is capable of healing from the damage their machine did to it, and he starts remembering, and then they throw his brain back in that blender? He’s gonna learn one thing -- remembering hurts. Healing hurts. If he associates remembering Clint -- remembering who he is -- with that level of torture, then he’s not gonna want to remember.”

“But I won’t hurt him,” Clint says, eyes wide.

“Psychological healing takes more than physical, sometimes,” Sam says. “It’s possible to break the conditioning, to help him develop new neural pathways, new associations with -- with his memories. But not if he keeps hiding.”

Steve drags a chair over to the bed, straddles it, and says, in his serious Captain America voice, “Natasha says you might be able to help us with this.”

Clint picks at his itchy hospital blanket, tries to look innocent and a little confused. “But I’m in the hospital,” he says. “How could I--”

“Clint,” Sam says, gentle. “If remembering you, and his connection with you, is what’s breaking through the conditioning, than I’m at least 99 per cent sure that he’s not gonna disappear and leave you until he makes sure you’re going to be okay.”

“Oh.” Was that why Bucky was sticking around?

“And in order for us to make sure Bucky’s gonna be okay, we need to find him. To… to catch him. And keep him safe. And help him,” Steve says. “You know -- you know that, what he did to you, that wasn’t him. Right?”

“What the fuck,” Clint says, scowling. “Of course I know that. What they made him into, that’s not Bucky. That’s the Winter Soldier.”

Steve taps his fingers on the side of the bed, thinking, and then he says, choosing his words very carefully, “Have you seen him here?”

“Bucky?” Clint says, shifting nervously. He’d promised not to tell -- if he breaks that promise, what if Bucky doesn’t come back? “No.”

“There’s surveillance footage,” Steve snaps. “We’ve seen--”

Sam cuts him off. “What about the Winter Soldier, Clint? Has he been here?”

Clint hesitates, because he promised. He promised not to tell.

Steve takes his hand, holds it tightly, carefully, and says, “Please, Clint.”

Clint closes his eyes. “But what if I break my promise and he doesn’t come back?”

“The FBI’s got the surveillance footage,” Steve says. “They’re sending a unit to bring him in -- dead or alive. He’s a threat, Clint. But if we can get him first, contain the threat, take care of him, then they don’t get their hands on him, and we can help him. We just need to find him first.”

Clint breathes out carefully, eyes still shut, and says, “Could you -- could you check under the bed? It’s stupid, he’s not there, I know he’s not there, but I told him that he could hide there and--”

Steve checks and Bucky’s not there, so Clint has him check the closet, the bathroom, behind the curtains and out on the windowsill, like he’s looking for monsters before bedtime, but Bucky’s not there and probably won’t hear if Clint breaks his promise, so he finally relaxes against his pillows and confesses, “He comes at night and looms in the shadows, and he tells me he doesn’t know me, but each time, he knows me a little better. I promised I wouldn’t tell or he wouldn’t be able to come back.”

“Okay,” Steve says, squeezing his hand. “Okay. That’s good. Thank you. We need your help to help him. Is that okay?”

If the FBI get him, Clint’s not sure he’ll ever get to see him again, so he says, “Yeah, Steve. I’ll help.”

*

They wait until dark, until the hospital room is flooded with shadows again, and Clint doesn’t sleep. He can’t, not when he’s this worried, this scared that someone’s going to fuck this up and Bucky will get scared -- more scared than he already is -- and run and Clint’ll never find him.

But they keep the routine the same. The visitors clear out the same, the guards switch at the same rate, the nurses turn out the lights at the same time. 

And Bucky slips into the room just before midnight.

Now that he’s not drugged, Clint sees the door inch open, right as the guards are switching, caught up in updating each other on whatever has happened during their shift. Bucky closes the door softly and then freezes when he sees Clint sitting up, watching him from the bed.

“You’re better,” Bucky says, and he still sounds defensive, unsure.

“A little,” Clint tells him. “Hi. Do you remember?”

Bucky shifts on his feet, like he’s going to run. Instead, he takes a step closer. “The circus,” he says, begrudgingly. “You --”

Clint smiles a little. “Yeah,” he says, nodding. “That’s where we first met. I picked your pocket. Steve was there. He was smaller.”

Bucky frowns and wanders a little closer. “I don’t know Steve.”

“Okay,” Clint says. He holds out a hand, like he expects Bucky to take it. Bucky doesn’t like to touch, though, and he shies away, looking suspicious.

“Doctors say my stitches can come out in a few days,” he says, like he doesn’t notice. “And today they took the bandages off my hands. Do you want to see?” He keeps holding his hand out, Bucky’s marks catching the moonlight spilling through the open curtains.

Bucky doesn’t seem able to resist that, and he drifts closer, carefully taking Clint’s wrist in his hand, tilting it to see the marks better and brushing his thumb over them. The soft touch makes Clint want to cry.

Instead, he turns his hand, sliding against Bucky’s, lacing their fingers together and holding on just a little too tight. When Bucky tries to pull away, he winces like it hurts and Bucky freezes, looking haunted.

“Your hair got so long,” Clint says, soft, and Bucky leans closer, like he wants to hear him better. Without letting go of his hand, Clint reaches up with the other and tucks Bucky’s hair behind his ear, slides his hand lower to press his palm against the line of Bucky’s jaw, cradling it. “I missed you.”

He can hear Bucky’s breathing, light and frantic, can see how wide and dark his eyes are, but Bucky doesn’t try pulling away, probably afraid of hurting Clint again.

“I shot you,” he says, raspy and broken. He trembles, but Clint doesn’t let go.

A small smile flickers at Clint’s lips and he says easily, “Non-lethal.” Bucky tries to pull away, gentle now, but Clint doesn’t let go. “Hey,” he says. “Just… stay, just for a minute. I missed you.”

The raw honesty of it makes his voice crack, as well as the worry that Bucky’s never going to forgive him for this. They’re so close, just a breath between them, and Clint wants to lean up, to kiss him, but his lip is stitched shut and the last time he kissed Bucky, Bucky disappeared for two years and Clint just can’t imagine letting that happen again, so instead he just cradles his face and relearns his features and doesn’t let go.

“I don’t remember you,” Bucky lies, but then he closes his eyes and rests his forehead so carefully against Clint’s and breathes as Clint’s hand slips up to tangle in his hair, to hold him close and keep him from opening his eyes, from turning his head, from seeing Steve, watching from the darkest shadows behind the door.

“I’m sorry,” Clint whispers. “I’m so sorry, forgive me.”

Bucky tenses up but it’s too late, the syringe with the sedative designed to take out even the strongest super soldier pricks his neck, and the results are nearly instantaneous.

Steve catches him before he hits the ground.

*

In all the commotion, it takes about half a day for Clint to give up trying to insist the doctors let him go. Eventually, he just gets up, ties his hospital gown around himself as best he can, and hobbles out of the hospital to hail a cab.

Halfway across the lobby at the Tower, Natasha shows up, rolling her eyes and holding a bathrobe, which is a relief, because the drafty hospital gown was quickly getting old.

“Maria’s pissed,” she tells him in the elevator. “But I think she’s secretly a little relieved that the media cycle has moved away from everything that happened with Rumlow and Bucky and is now all caught up with your naked ass getting out of a taxi.”

“Is Bucky okay?” he asks, and she lets him lean on her. He’s dizzy and he hurts but no one had been back to tell him about Bucky and that matters more.

“They’re doing an assessment down in medical,” she tells him. “He still hasn’t woken up. Steve’s with Tony in the lab, they’ve found some footage of what happened -- Hydra filmed it. You don’t want to see.”

“Steve’s not with him?” Clint asks, and he’s not sure if the spike of anxiety in his chest is an echo of what Bucky’s feeling or his own. “Who’s looking after him?”

“The doctors,” she says. “He’s in good hands.”

“You said SHIELD was corrupt. How do you know they aren’t Hydra doctors? How do you know--”

He rubs at his chest. The anxiety is increasing, becoming something closer to panic.

“Calm down,” she tells him as the elevator opens. They’re on the medical floor and he’s glad she’s not going to force him to go straight to bed. “While you were gone, we -- we dealt with that. SHIELD is gone. Fury is gone. We--”

Maybe Clint should have given a fuck about SHIELD but he never did. It was only ever a vehicle for finding Bucky after Bucky disappeared. Now, though? Now his chest feels like it’s cracking open with panic-driven terror, and he knows that’s not him. It’s Bucky.

“Shit,” he mumbles, because, aside from when he was lost to Loki’s magic and Bucky was lost to whatever they’d done to him, he’s always felt an echo of what Bucky was feeling, but this is so intense, so all-consuming, that it hits him like a blow to the chest and he staggers, reaching out to catch his balance.

The panic doesn’t ease and he tries to breathe through it.

“Something’s wrong,” he pants. “Tasha, where is he?”

Natasha swears but takes him by the hand, helping him along when he starts trembling too hard to manage on his own.

They make their way down the hallway, past the medical unit, and into the containment unit used to hold the Hulk.

They’ve got Bucky strapped into a chair in one of the Hulk’s unbreakable pods, and Bucky is awake, thrashing against the restraints and practically feral with fear.

Half a dozen doctors are so busy watching the monitors showing his vitals and commenting on his heart rate to even notice that he’s about to claw himself to pieces to escape.

“No, no, no,” Clint snaps, his own rage giving him the strength to push away from Natasha, to storm into the room. “What the fuck are you doing, get him out of there.”

A doctor looks up and presses his lips together and says, “It’s built to hold the Hulk, it will contain him without hurting him. We just need --”

“Get him out of that fucking chair,” Clint snarls. “What the fuck were you thinking.” He’s shouting and he doesn’t care because no one is listening, no one is fixing it, and Bucky’s wrists are starting to bleed where he’s twisting mindlessly against the metal brackets holding him down.

Natasha swears under her breath, soft and brutal Russian, and hits a switch that opens the door between the observation deck and the containment cell. Clint staggers into the cell, to Bucky’s side, and hears Natasha say, “Jarvis, get Steve and Tony down here. Unlock the restraints, and then you can explain to Captain America who thought the best way to deal with a traumatized and brainwashed super soldier was to restrain him exactly the same way Hydra did.”

“Hey,” Clint says, soft, pushing Bucky’s hair out of his face. “Hey, Bucky, you’re okay. Just breathe, okay, I’ll get you out of here, you’re fine.”

He’s not sure Bucky recognizes him, even if he remembers him today, but Clint knows Bucky won’t hurt him. He climbs up onto the chair, onto Bucky’s lap, still cradling his face, and Bucky goes still, his chest heaving with panicked breaths, and he stares up at Clint.

“God, I’m sorry,” Clint says, voice cracking. “I never would have let them take you if I knew they’d do this.”

The lead doctor steps into the cell and says, “I really need to insist you back away, Mr. Barton. He’s highly unstable and--”

“Undo the restrains,” Natasha says in that calm, deadly voice she’s got that’s somehow much more frightening than Clint’s furious shouting.

The doctor obeys, stepping close to the chair to unlock them, and the instant Bucky’s free, he’s up out of the chair, Clint tumbling to the floor and jarring all of his fragile, healing parts. Then he’s got his metal fist closed around the doctor’s throat, got the doctor slammed back against the side of the containment cell, and holy shit, if Bucky kills the doctor, that’ll make everything worse with the government who sees him as a threat.

A guard rushes in with a gun and Natasha’s quick to disable that threat, and Clint scrambles up and tugs at Bucky’s hand and says, “Bucky, no, let go. He’s a dick, but you can’t kill him, okay? I won’t let him do it again. Please, Bucky.”

Bucky’s jaw flexes and his grip tightens and he’s going to do it, he’s going to tear the doctor’s head clear off.

And then Steve is there. “Buck,” he says, gentle, hand on Bucky’s shoulder. “Bucky, hey. It’s okay. I’ve got you.”

Bucky shudders and the terror Clint’s still feeling in his chest cracks open into something darker, deeper, an endless sort of grief that Clint recognizes because he felt it too, when coming back from Loki.

“Stevie,” Bucky whispers, and then he’s letting go, crumbling, and Steve is catching him and holding him up and looking just as shattered. “What did I do?”

“It’s okay, everything’s okay, you’re home now.”

Bucky’s crying, and Clint stands there, frozen, staring and feeling broken himself, until Natasha slips up beside him and says, “You’ve knocked your stitches loose. If you want to avoid medical, I can patch you up in your room, and I know Lucky’d love to see you.”

“Bucky,” Clint whispers, because he can’t leave, not now, but Bucky is falling apart in Steve’s arms and Steve is probably the only one strong enough to hold him up -- Steve’s been holding Bucky up since they were children, even when he was so much smaller.

So Clint lets Natasha draw him away.

*

Clint’s body begins to heal, the stitches coming out and the cuts and abrasions scarring over. His bones begin to knit back together and his brain gradually returns to the way it was before it got bashed around again. His bruises fade, and though he’s still got a bit of a limp as his ankle heals up, he’s barely in any pain.

And he still hasn’t seen Bucky.

He gets updates from Steve, who says that Bucky’s doing better bit by bit, everyday. He’s remembering more and more, and becoming steadier, stronger, though the nightmares are still vivid and strong.

He just… doesn’t want to see Clint.

Clint can feel him in his chest, knows when he’s struggling, which is pretty much all the time. Knows when he’s afraid, or angry, or frustrated. Sometimes he worries that Bucky’s had enough -- he’s trying to break the bond the way Wanda had said he could, back in the beginning.

Clint wouldn’t blame him if Bucky had had enough of him. 

But he respects Bucky’s wishes and doesn’t try to force his way into Steve’s rooms to see him, for all that he spends a long time planning exactly how he’d do it. 

Sam told him that the best way he can help Bucky right now is to work on regulating his own emotions, because Bucky could feel them. Having a source of steady strength, positivity and warmth coming from Clint can help Bucky deal with his own emotions.

So Clint does his best to be calm, patient, and, though he can’t quite manage happy, begrudgingly content with the way things are.

He has a home, he has Lucky, and Bucky is safe again. Really, it would be selfish of him to ask for more.

The fallout from the dismantling of SHIELD is ongoing, but Clint finds it difficult to care. SHIELD is gone but the Avengers are still here, so what difference does it make, really. They get sent out on a few missions and he’s always the first to volunteer, because Steve is busy with Bucky and Clint has nothing better to do that watch Natasha’s back while she takes out robots or mutant giant rats or Hydra cells.

And then, one afternoon when Clint is alone in the kitchen, poking morosely at the coffee machine and trying to figure out what to do with the rest of the day, Steve comes in, looking serious and concerned, and he asks if Clint has a minute.

“Is it Bucky?” Clint asks, dropping into a seat at the table. “Is he okay? Does he want to see me? Did you tell him I said hi, and that playing Mario Karts sucks without him, and that I don’t blame him, and that I’m all healed?”

Steve hesitates and then says, “I was actually wondering if maybe you could do me a favour.”

He looks nervous, which makes Clint nervous. “Yeah, sure, whatever you need,” he says, wondering if he’ll regret it.

Steve winces. Preemptive wincing is never a good sign. “Well,” he starts, clearly hedging. “I don’t want you to think this is -- is a reflection on you or anything, but. Sam and I have been working with Bucky and he’s doing so much better, but he’s still not ready to see you. He’s just -- he gets so scared and even the suggestion of it causes him to regress a bit, undoes some of the progress.”

“Oh,” Clint says, though he knows all this. Sam’s explained it a million times, has told Clint over and over and over again that it’s not Clint that Bucky’s afraid of, it’s hurting Clint again.

Clint wants to scream that this whole situation is hurting more than Bucky’s fists had ever hurt, but he’s also focusing super hard on staying calm and positive and optimistic so that’s what Bucky feels whenever he focuses on what Clint’s feeling, so he’s stayed quiet.

“And Sam thinks the next big step in his recovery is getting him out here, interacting with people who aren’t me and Sam.” He hesitates again, clears his throat, rubs at the back of his neck, and his cheeks are turning pink. This is not going to go well for Clint, and he does his best to brace himself, but still doesn’t see it coming when Steve says quietly, “It’s just, I could probably get him out here if I could promise you wouldn’t be here.”

“Oh.” Clint says, shaken, after a moment in which he can’t speak at all. “Oh. Oh, so you want me to… you want me to leave.”

Steve winces again. “Not permanently!” He hurries to say. “Not forever. Just for a little bit. You could go visit Sam, or… or your brother, or take a vacation, or--”

“Yeah, no, sure, that’s. I get it,” Clint says, but he’s barely aware of what he’s saying, pushing his chair back, stepping away, moving on autopilot. “That makes. That’s cool, it makes perfect sense, yeah, this is Bucky’s home and I -- I never really. He never really wanted me here, and.”

“Clint,” Steve says, miserable. “It’s not that -- you know it’s not that.”

But isn’t that just what Steve said? Clint shakes his head and musters up a grin and keeps himself calm and optimistic and positive, just in case Bucky can feel it. “It’s fine, Steve. A vacation, that sounds nice. Florida, or. Or Mexico. Or visit my brother. Yeah. I’ll just -- tell him I --”

He grimaces and he’s got nothing left -- no more positivity or patience, because this hurts. And the only thing that was keeping him upright, keeping him balanced, was having a home and having Lucky and Bucky being safe.

Two out of three isn’t bad. He just… shouldn’t have gotten used to having a home.

“Clint, wait,” Steve says, but Clint just shakes his head and walks away and he’s still smiling, but it’s shaky, and if he doesn’t get away right now, it’ll be gone entirely.

“It’s fine, Steve. Don’t worry,” he says, and then the elevator doors close and he slumps against the wall as he goes down to his own apartment, rubbing at his face and breathing as best he can and if he’s crying, only Jarvis knows, and Bucky, if he’s paying attention.

He doesn’t have much stuff so it doesn’t take much to pack. He considers leaving Lucky here, but in the end, can’t quite manage it. He’s feeling a little selfish like that.

He leaves the tower and doesn’t know where to go, so he heads to Central Park.

*

Lucky seems happy enough to see their old bridge, which is good, at least. And it’s not that Clint intends to live there again -- he worked for SHIELD for two years and stashed every penny they ever paid him into a super secret emergency bank account. He’s got options.

It’s just… familiarity is nice. So he sits there and plays fetch with Lucky and thinks about his next move, because he’s not going back to Sam’s -- Sam’s been staying here and working with Bucky anyway. And he’s not going to see his brother, who’s still serving time out west. The idea of going and hanging out on a beach somewhere while Bucky is still not doing well makes him want to puke.

So maybe he should look at getting his own place.

The problem is that being an Avenger doesn’t actually pay anything -- probably because all of the other Avengers actually are independently wealthy and haven’t had to think about money for a long time. Even Steve’s got the military dumping regular amounts into his bank account. Now that SHIELD doesn’t exist, Clint doesn’t actually have a source of income.

He wonders idly if the archery range in DC is hiring and if Kate misses him and if they’d take him back.

And then Natasha is dropping down to the ground beside him, crossing her legs, and saying, “You’re a goddamned idiot and Steve is worse.”

“I wasn’t going to live here,” he tells her quickly, but he slumps under the weight of her glare and shrugs miserably. “I just… didn’t know where to go. But I was figuring it out.”

“I was going to kill Steve,” she tells him, tugging him against her side and wrapping an arm around his shoulders. “But I’m going to let Sam do it instead. And you’re coming home with me.”

“The Tower is your home,” Clint says, muffled against her shoulder. “I can’t --”

“I’ve got other homes.”

“Safe houses aren’t homes, Tasha,” he says, but he’s smiling even as he blinks back tears.

“Then we’ll make it a home,” she snaps. “We’ll get curtains and a goddamned microwave and a couch that doesn’t have suspicious stains on it and we’ll host dinner parties and play Apples to Apples like real goddamned adults and Steve Rogers can go fuck himself. Come on. I parked in a no parking zone and I stole Steve’s car to do it, so I don’t want to get it towed. Too much paperwork.”

He lets her drag him out of the park, Lucky trotting happily behind, and they spend the day at Ikea, buying cheap art and furniture to fix up her empty, utilitarian Bed-Stuy apartment, and seeing Natasha barely keeping her cool surrounded by soccer moms in an Ikea bedding department is one of the highlights of Clint’s entire year.

That night, as he falls asleep curled up on the floor of her safe house, next to half a dozen torn open Ikea boxes and an abandoned bed frame that’s only been partially constructed, he can’t help but smile, even if it is a little sad.

He might not get to have the Tower and Bucky, but he still gets to have a home.

*

He’s home alone, burning French toast, a week later, when someone kicks the door down.

It’s Bucky and he’s furious.

His face is white with rage, tight with tension, and Clint just stares at him, clutching a spatula while his french toast smokes away. Lucky, as oblivious to the tension as ever, whines and throws himself at Bucky, wagging his tail so hard, his entire body shakes with it, and Bucky falls to the ground like someone’s cut his strings, swearing viciously under his breath even as he wraps both arms around the dog and shakes, hiding his face in Lucky’s fur.

“Bed-Stuy, Clint, really?” he asks. “Do you have any idea how fucking difficult it was to get here?”

Clint looks at the doorway for Steve of Sam or anybody, but no one shows up. Apparently Bucky’s alone. “Bucky,” he says, stunned. “How did you…”

“I took the goddamned subway,” he says, voice raspy.

Clint doesn’t know what to do with his hands -- with his whole body -- so he sets the spatula down carefully and turns off the stove and looks around and says helplessly, “But. Why.”

Bucky turns his head away from Lucky enough to glare. “Because you don’t get to leave,” he says. “I mean. If you want to leave, fucking leave, but Steve doesn’t get to fucking tell you to leave because I’m too fucked up to leave my fucking room. It’s your fucking home, Clint, Jesus, what the fuck were you thinking, you don’t have to leave.”

“But. You didn’t want me,” Clint says helplessly, still hovering by the burned toast, still not quite sure this is real.

Bucky closes his eyes and swears some more and Clint -- Clint’s thought about what it would be like to see Bucky again, to be near him, and he wants to touch -- to cling -- to beg Bucky not to go away again.

But he’s not sure what he’s allowed to do so he just… hovers. And breaks apart inside. And wonders how long he gets to have this before it goes away again.

Bucky exhales and says, “Of course I -- I shot you. I hurt you. I almost killed you.”

“Yeah, but. I got better,” Clint says, shoulders slumping a little. “And Steve said… he said you couldn’t recover, with me there, so I…” He shrugs. “I didn’t wanna make it worse.”

Bucky gets to his feet and looks around the apartment critically, taking in the mismatched curtains that Clint had tried to hang on his own, the couch, the partially constructed bookshelf, and the crooked art print featuring a fishbowl. He carefully closes the door, scowling when the latch won’t work, and Clint stares at him hungrily and tries to remember every detail.

He’s pale and his hands are trembling, his hair is still longer than it used to be, and he’s restless, marking sight lines and places where the shadows are thicker. He doesn’t seem quite comfortable in his own skin anymore, and Clint can feel his anxiety in his own chest.

He’s still the most beautiful thing Clint’s ever seen.

“My recovery is not your responsibility,” he says finally. He sounds like he’s quoting Sam.

He looks like he’s going to fall over, and Clint says, “You can sit. If you want. If you’re staying. You should stay, for a while.”

After Bucky collapses gratefully on the sofa, Clint gets him a beer and hands it over carefully, making sure not to touch. He remembers how much he hated touch, after Loki. He can’t sit, though, hovering anxiously and watching.

“A week ago you couldn’t leave Steve’s rooms,” he says finally. “And now you’re -- you took the subway to Bed-Stuy?”

“Because you left,” Bucky says. “You just -- who the fuck tells the formerly homeless kid that he has to leave? That’s what they did to you, at the circus, and then Steve fucking did the same thing? I couldn’t -- I didn’t know if you were safe or if you were eating or if -- And you’re nearly burning this fucking place down!” He gestures angrily to the smoky kitchen, and Clint perches carefully on the edge of the sofa as far from Bucky as he can get.

“How did you know if I was safe before?” he asks, quiet.

Bucky glares down at his hands, which are tangled in Lucky’s fur. Lucky presses against his legs, tongue lolling happily. “Jarvis told me,” he grumbles. “Every day. Multiple times a day. I kept asking, until he just started… reporting. Every hour or so. And whenever I woke up from a nightmare, and I needed -- I just needed to know.”

Clint closes his eyes and tries to breathe through the way it feels like his chest is cracking open -- and it’s his own emotions this time, not Bucky’s. But he starts to cry. He can’t not start to cry. It’s been so long -- so long since they found Bucky, since they were looking for Bucky, since they’d first lost him, and he’d tried so, so fucking hard to keep it together, to stay strong and optimistic and patient so if Bucky could feel him, he’d be helping.

But all that time, it had been hurting, and now, it was just too much.

“I looked for you,” he says, words broken by sobs. “I kept looking, for two years, and we couldn’t find you, but sometimes I could feel you and it hurt, and I’m sorry, I’m so sorry it took so long and you were right there, and I couldn’t find you, I’m so sorry, and then you didn’t want me, but you were safe, and it should’ve been enough but it never felt like it was enough, I’m sorry.”

“Oh sweetheart,” Bucky says, and then he’s got Clint in his arms, against his chest and half in his lap, holding him with one hand tangled in his hair, the other tightly around him, holding on, and Clint’s face is pressed to the side of his neck, and he keeps trying to stop crying but he can’t. He needs to be strong and calm and patient for Bucky but he just fucking can’t anymore, so he cries and he twists his hands up in Bucky’s soft sweater and holds tightly because he doesn’t know how long he gets to have this and he’s going to hold onto it for as long as he can.

“Listen,” Bucky says, tugging lightly at his hair, until Clint lifts his head to look at him. He sniffs pathetically and Bucky wipes his tears with his thumb, his voice low and quiet and firm when he says, “That’s not something for you to apologize for, okay? You found me. And you brought me home. And even -- even in the time I was gone, you were the one who brought me back.” He breathes out carefully and then says, “Sam says -- Sam says that, because of the… of everything they did, when I’d start to remember, that I started to associate remembering with… with all the pain. But that wasn’t you. You were… helping me heal. And I know that. And you need to know it too. If I didn’t have you, and my bond with you, then there wouldn’t have been anything left for you to find. And it’s healing -- it’s all healed. It’s just, there’s scarring. And I get scared of fucking everything. And when Sam told me what Steve did, and that you were gone -- the idea of you being gone and not being able to know you were safe every time I woke up from a nightmare, that was scarier than the idea of seeing you.”

Clint’s crying again, but Bucky doesn’t seem to mind, just holds him more tightly, and brushes his thumb against the new scar just above Clint’s lip, where it had cracked open under Bucky’s metal fist. “I didn’t wanna hurt you again and I did it anyway,” he says, his own voice faltering now. “I’m the one who should be sorry. And I am. I’m so sorry, Clint.”

Clint can’t help a watery, broken little laugh. “You were supposed to kill me and you didn’t,” he says, because that’s so much more important than a little pain. “And I got better.”

“You’re an idiot, that’s what you are,” Bucky tells him, unbearably fond, and then he brushes the lightest kiss over Clint’s scar -- and then then along his cheekbone, where the fracture was, and the corner of his eye, where the contusion had been, and then the middle of his forehead, where he hadn’t been hurt at all. Then he lets Clint collapse against his chest and hide his face in Bucky’s shoulder again, and holds on tightly, and for the first time in over two years, Clint feels like he can breathe again.

“Talk about idiots,” he mumbles. “You pushed me away when I kissed you.”

He surprises a startled laugh out of Bucky, which makes him smile against his shoulder. “Uh,” Bucky says, cheek pressed to Clint’s temple. “Yeah. We were gonna talk about that, weren’t we.”

“Don’t need to,” Clint says, closing his eyes. “I know all about how much you didn’t want to push me away, from when I touched your mark. Which you never told me you had. Which we are going to talk about. I mean. If you want to. If we -- if this -- I mean, if you don’t want --”

Bucky runs a hand down his back and says, “I do want, and we can talk about it, about whatever you want. I always want -- I mean, always did want this. You. I just. Sam said -- you were unsure and I needed to give you space, and I needed to make sure you knew what you wanted and weren’t just doing what I wanted and --”

“Two years is a long time for space,” Clint tells him. “Too much space.”

“Yeah,” Bucky whispers, and they’re both quiet for a long time, just breathing.

When Bucky kisses him, it’s careful Clint doesn’t hesitate at all to kiss him back, to prove just how much he wants this. 

He’s holding on tight but Bucky’s holding on tighter.

Sam’s always on him to make his own choices and this is what he’s choosing, what he’s always going to choose, and now that he knows Bucky’s choosing it too, he thinks that maybe, maybe, he really gets to have this.

*

They take a taxi back to the Tower, because Clint doesn’t think Bucky can handle the subway again so soon, and he knows Lucky wouldn’t be welcome.

Bucky’s got him by the hand, refusing to let go when Clint wants to stay in the elevator, maybe go back to the lobby, maybe back to Central Park, because he can’t help but think Steve’s going to be mad at him for everything that’s happened. Clint was supposed to stay away.

So he hides behind Bucky as Bucky marches him and Lucky determinedly into the main lounge, where Sam, Tony and Steve are sitting with Natasha, who looks pretty smug.

And Steve. Steve is grinning. “I told you,” he says, elbowing Sam in the side. “I told you he just needed a good enough reason to leave the Tower.”

Sam rolls his eyes but he’s smiling as he says, “Yeah, Steve. Great idea. Send his soulmate away without telling anybody, that’s a great and non-emotionally manipulative way to force him to get over his fear of the outside world.”

“I’m glad you’re back,” Steve says, ignoring Sam and folding both Bucky and Clint into a tight hug, and Clint’s not sure if Steve means Bucky or if he means him but he thinks he might mean them both.

“Welcome home,” Steve says, solemn and serious and just for Clint.

And, yes, Clint thinks, holding tightly to Bucky’s hand, wrapped in Steve’s hug, with Lucky bouncing happily at his feet. He gets to have this. He finally gets to be home.

The end.


End file.
